Mars or Bust

Red Dead No Redemption
exurb1a

He does a good job of laying out all the problems you are going to encounter trying to live on Mars. Mars does not look like a good candidate for colonization, but just going through the motions of setting up any kind of base there would be a good learning experience, because as we all should know, there is a good deal of difference between theory and practice. Assuming we can develop a spaceship capable of traversing interstellar differences, setting up a base on a planet in another star system is going to encounter all of the same problems we would have in setting up a base on Mars, we'd just have longer transit times.