Plural? Colonies?! Look how much it took to send up the space shuttle to LOW earth orbit. Look at the size of the rockets that it took to send TWO people at a time to the surface of the moon.
http://www.pbchistoryonline.org/middle-school-lessons/023-Cape_Canaveral/NASA-rockets.jpg
Space shuttle was pretty dinky compared to the Saturn rockets. And those sent up 3 people. How many Saturn rockets would it take to have colonie
s? 100 rockets = 300 people at that rate. But wait - you need supplies on the rocket for a multi-month trip, not to mention supplies for when you get there, etc.
Though, I suspect that if there was some place to actually go, there would be a hell of a lot more research dollars spent on developing a material that could serve as the tether for a space elevator. Being able to get stuff into space for 1% the current cost (per pound) and having a reason to put a LOT of stuff in space would make the development a lot more practical.
But, if it was hospitable - it WOULD be worth doing. But, Mars is NOT hospitable. There's no reason to send humans there, other than to say "hey, look what we did."
As for it being hospitable today, in our reality, it COULD be... but it would require habitation environments. We could grow things using the available sunlight and supplemental light, and establish a large biodome of sorts that, through a natural cycle, provides a natural O2/CO2 sustainable recycling system.
It would be quite costly, and it would require some attainable need to even be worthwhile. Is there a valuable resource that can be mined on Mars? If we determine that to be the case, you can bet more of the smart types will begin really putting some effort into making this feasible.
For our dream-world scenario... well, if early missions and the earliest observations would have suggested it MIGHT be habitable, the space programs of the world would be very different today.
Not different in "we have a few percent of light-speed" different, nor "colonies EVERYWHERE" different, but different nonetheless. How?
Earliest observations of Mars, nearly one hundred years ago, perked our curiosity with detailed drawings and possibilities. If those were far and above different, we would have focused our observational efforts.
By the time we started surveying the planets with more technological efforts, Mars would have been a prime focus above all else. Space exploration and every lander and observation platform would have been designed with different goals than they had been in reality, and by today, we would probably have already sent at least one human to Mars.
Quite likely, we would have had a landing team there already, doing manned surveys.
Our space exploration efforts would be focused on the new problem of moving more bodies than shuttles, and the challenges of the longer mission and radiation, as the primary objectives, would probably already be "solved."
Propulsion likely wouldn't be any different, with all this in mind, but we'd likely have the ability and means to send teams of 25 or more to establish working colonies (again, provided there is some short-term goal that can actually be had).
Large, self-sufficient city-sized colonies? Probably wouldn't be possible. But I could imagine a solution of a habitable mini-colony acting as a ferry to Mars.
It would have been what was assembled in space, instead of the ISS. Shuttles or something would send 10 up at a time, and when they reached capacity, they would move to Mars orbit.
The first few years of this effort would involve sending ready-to-assemble parts for a vehicular launch platform to be installed on Mars. I think it would be possible this was already constructed by now, had we figured out awhile ago Mars could be habitable for humans.
Of course this is moot, I realize, because the engineering effort required in reality is a far different animal than this habitable-Mars scenario.
It's too bad, really. Damn Nature screwed this everything up: no massive iron core = no strong magnetic field = no ability to protect atmosphere from solar winds = cannot hold onto atmosphere.
It could "receive" an atmosphere faster than it loses it, but as we see today, eventually time will see our star erasing any atmosphere that gets built up. Based on evidence thus far, it is quite likely Mars had an atmosphere very similar to Earth's, at one point. But as we see - it's not there anymore.
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