... going through a recent study from JPL that takes a serious look at the unserious idea of terraforming Mars. At the risk of a spoiler, the conclusion is not encouraging.
While everyone reading this probably already knew how this was going to come out, it's worth walking through the numbers to get some sense of the full absurdity of what Elon Musk and his fellow travelers have been spouting on this.
One particularly silly point that the video doesn't really dig into is Musk's fondness for framing Martian colonization in terms of a Plan B, a place that humanity can go if Earth becomes uninhabitable. The standard hypothetical here would be an asteroid strike or some other disaster. The problem with that idea is that, despite all sorts of cataclysmic events, Earth has been more habitable than current-day Mars for 3 billion or so years, and it's difficult to come up with a scenario that would change that.
Though it's a rather silly exercise, if you were really concerned with humanity surviving the apocalypse, you could find all sorts of safe harbors to hide out in, either deep in the Earth or under the oceans. It would neither be that challenging nor that expensive, though it does have the downside of actually being doable.
Of course, the push for Martian colonies from the techno-optimists, like the enthusiasm for humanoid robots or hyperloops, has nothing to do with engineering, or economics, or any other practical concerns. These things are all inspired by a bizarre fascination with juvenile post-war science fiction combined with generally fascist-leaning libertarianism and the constant need for grifting.
Terraforming Mars is an Industrial Nightmare
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