alt Hacker News> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc
All of those had (and always had) far more obvious benefits than colonizing Mars, including the squishy benefit of "beating the Soviet Union to a contested goal."
You can disprove me by stating plainly what the benefits of colonizing Mars would be?
Current international law prohibits nation states from establishing permanent territories or settlements, but the Artemis Accords both afford states the opportunity to exploit resources and establish "safety zones" around operational settlements that prohibit other actors from interfering with them. This means that, practically speaking, whoever establishes a permanent operational presence on any celestial body has a right to exclude other actors from those settlements, which establishes a bit of a land grab.
Given the current geopolitical climate, it's possible we could see nation states feel an urgent need to stake their claim in order to not lose out on access to those resources forevermore. This is just as much, if not more, of an argument to colonize the Moon rather than Mars, but both are subject to the same international laws.