alt Hacker NewsI'm not saying we won't possibly land someone on Mars eventually. I just don't think that's going to happen in a reasonable near future. The resources involved are too much for one person willing to go on a suicide mission to do it themselves (and those who do have the resources are very much not interested in dying) and for a government to sponsor this you would need a culture of self-sacrifice rather than rugged individualism - in other words, a country like China might be more likely to take the lead here than the US and even that seems unlikely.
Again, the big problem here is scale. It takes a lot more resources to send someone to Mars than to Antarctica and it takes a lot more resources to keep them alive there. Your friend in the high arctic trundra probably also isn't living in collapsible tents and foraging for food - all the infrastructure available to him (even if it's just shelter) needs to be built on Mars too and is orders of magnitude more complex and more resource intense and the materials are much harder to ship and assemble - plus of course material failure is signficantly more lethal.
Hate to break this to you, they do in fact go on expeditions in tents for quite a bit, with guns (polar bears). You've got them insofar as they don't forage for food, turns out we have portable food tech. There is a base camp but there are areas where they go far. They get govt issued Canada Goose jackets! What a perk! O Canada!
I agree with all you are saying, and those techs can be developed. I am a tech optimist. I see these as problems to try to solve, not a list of reasons why they can't happen.
We can agree as well that it will be fantastically more expensive and yes an order of magnitude etc etc. These are engineering problems, not physics problems. Probability vs possibility in my mind. We can disagree about if the resources are worth spending (that's not my call, I vote, which doesn't seem to do much). I can't predict the future.
Another point against it is it used to be a boat with dudes sent into the unknown with no way to know what to know what was happening. This was totally affordable for imperial seafaring nations at the time relative to the cost of rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_Age_of_Antarctic_Explor...
After this age there was a rise in using tech to do it. (mechanical age I think?)
It will be an insane feat to pull off, and I hope it happens in our life time.