[redahs]

There's not much reason to settle the moon and mars prior to the remote establishment of an independent food supply. Aggressive remote terraforming through domes, mirrors, foreign microorganisms, explosives, and robots should come first. Establishing automated synthetic systems on these rocks to mimic what nature provides for free on Earth is the hard problem to be solving. Without such systems already place, wages will be extremely low and no one will want to live there.

[nine_k]

It may be easier to undertake a massive industrial operation on an unfamiliar celestial body when there is a human around to oversee things first-hand and troubleshoot issues when (not if) they arise.

First Lunar habitats are going to be mostly underground anyway, and nuclear-powered. Not much is needed to terraform.

[NikolaeVarius]

I'm constantly "impressed" (not in a good way) at how good some people are at saying completely unfounded statements as fact. There is literally no reason to believe either premise of most bases being underground, nor is there to believe nuclear power will be the dominant power source. We have a hard time getting RTGs inside steel boxes capable of surviving disasters into orbit.

[rdlw]

Viability due to public opinion is a reason. I think that NASA has been successful enough in popularizing the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets, 'Planetary Protection', that any plan for 'aggressive remote terraforming' would be met with public outcry, for the sake of preserving areological history.

[LargeWu]

"the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets"

I think their ideal is to protect planets from interfering with their ecosystems unintentionally. Microbial contamination, for example. Especially Mars, since we don't know what kind of life, if any, existed or currently exists there. Also some of Saturn's and maybe Jupiter's moons. But I think if there were ever a strategic reason and viable option to terraform one of those bodies, which I think is pretty unlikely anyway, NASA would probably consider it. But by that time, I think it's extremely likely that NASA and the USA probably wouldn't exist as we know it anyway.

[runarberg]

Please, leave Mars’s surface alone! We’re merely starting to explore it and we don’t understand it. Don’t ruin it before we have a chance to.