Pure crap intended to keep the federal coffers open.

We can’t live on Mars. The closest and most life friendly planet and we cannot live there for more than a few seconds without expensive and abnormal efforts and equipment. We cannot live om Mars anymore than we can live on the bottom of the ocean. We CAN throw so much money at it that it will briefly appear that we are doing it as long as you don’t look at the billions and trillions of dollars behind the curtain.

As for living in a different solar system we can’t get there. It would take decades to get to the nearest solar system where we would likely find that all the planets are not nearly as life friendly as the deadly Mars planet is. We would have to search 100 million solar systems in our own galaxy in the hope of finding a life friendly planet. This would take 100’s of millions of years, literally impossible. AND if we were to find one, one life friendly planet somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy we still can’t get their in a human lifetime.

Pipe dreams make more sense.

Hear, hear, to what Oneguy says. I have made the point repeatedly, elsewhere, that there is not and cannot be any basis for a self-supporting economy on Mars. After all, no such community exists on Antarctica, where you can breathe the (cold) air, there is plentiful (frozen) fresh water, and the oceans are full of mammals and fish to eat. Why might that be? Could it be that the environment is so alien to our nature that, even with our technology and the promise of escape only weeks or months away, no one chooses to permanently live there? Interplanetary colonization enthusiasts seem to have suffered an overexposure to science fiction in their earlier years. They seem to have difficulty imagining what being stuck in a metal can with a handful of others whom you cannot escape from would be like, in a desolate, unchanging environment. After a few months of that, murder, suicide, or the airlock will look like the best options available.