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Notes -
The Polynesians didn’t face any of the obstacles of space exploration and colonization though. The cost? Chop down a couple of trees, tie them with vines, launch with maybe a big container full of water (that you can easily refill with rainwater) and live off the fat of tge ocean by fishing. Once you land, you still have the ocean for fishing Annnd more than likely you’ll have edible food on whatever island you land on. It’s cheap to do, requires few resources to get there and few to survive once you make landfall. You barely need the ability to plan ahead to pull this off.
And space is absolutely not like this. Mars is 9 months of travel away, and you need to take everything you need to survive with you — air, water, food, etc. you need to overcome the negative health effects of zero gravity. And everything you carry is limited by the physics of launching a rocket into space — launching a kilogram of matter costs $1500. You need 9 months of air, water, food, exercise equipment, the crew itself, waste disposal, and so on. A single rocket to mars is pretty resource intensive. It gets worse. You can’t just pluck a coconut off the abundant trees on mars. In fact, not only are there no trees, but it would require pretty extensive work to get to the place where you could plant food on mars. And you need to take that stuff along with you. And extra supplies to support the crew while they set all this up. Point being that space is nothing like the ocean. And at such high cost, it’s going to compare pretty unfavorably to just about anything else in the national budget. We can work on the mars colony that might be at least resource neutral 40 years from now, or we could spend those billions on AI, or education, or anti poverty programs,or cure a disease, or building a big gold tourist attraction statue of Trump. Even the statue might be a net gain simply because people will want to travel to see it and spend money while there. For most of these things, other than prestige, space loses pretty handily compared to most other ways one could spend the money.
Also the sea exploration one is a lot easier to trial-and-error, especially over a multi-generational timeframe. Not that the Polynesian navigators necessarily got purely lucky, but each exploration mission is far less costly on society.
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