[mendort]

I don't think living on mars will be that hard. I think building the large industrial base required to extract resources and manufacture the equipment required to live on mars will be very difficult (read expensive and slow).

It may, in fact, require more resources for one person to live on mars than one person can produce with our current (or near future) level of technology.

I think just building the energy infrastructure to do energy expensive things like make steel or silicon ingots will be very difficult. Not to mention that there is no source of petroleum on mars, so plastics are going to have to synthesized using other materials. The difficulties are legion once you get down to the details.

[ccallebs]

How sure are we that there's no petroleum on Mars? If Mars contained any sort of life at one point or another the likelihood of fossil fuels is there, correct?

[gambiting]

This would be the biggest discovery of all time, if we actually discovered remains of life on another planet. At the moment and as far as we know, there is no life on Mars and there never has been. It would be fantastic to be proven otherwise, but we cannot rely on hopes of finding oil.

[jessaustin]

My understanding is that Mars at this time has much less sedimentation than Earth has. It may have had more in the past, but was there ever the volume of organic material that Earth has had in e.g. the Gulf of Mexico or the Tethys Sea?

[arjie]

If we find fossil fuels on Mars, I'm not entirely sure we'll be climbing over each other to burn them. That would be a discovery of immense importance.