If anybody had told me in 1969 that I’d be 72 and there wouldn’t be colonies on the moon or Mars, I would have thought they were nuts, Zubrin, author of “The Case for Mars” and “The New World on Mars,” told me last week here in Copenhagen, where he was an invited speaker at a conference on astrobiology.

Abandoning Apollo

It would be as if Christopher Columbus had come back from the New World for the very first time and Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had said ‘So what? Get lost; we’re not interested,’ Zubrin told me at the “Unique Species on A Unique Planet?’ conference at Denmark’s University of Copenhagen.

There was clear commercial potential for Spain.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/motivations-colonization/

Spain was driven by three main motivations. Columbus, in his voyage, sought fame and fortune, as did his Spanish sponsors. To this end, Spain built a fort in 1565 at what is now St. Augustine, Florida; today, this is the oldest permanent European settlement in the United States. A few fledgling Spanish settlements were established nearby, but clashes with Native Americans who lived there, and the lack of gold or other riches made many of them short-lived. Spanish conquistadors had better success in South America, where they conquered the Aztec and Inca Empires and claimed the land for Spain. Spain soon grew rich from ample deposits of gold and silver in Mexico, Central America, and South America.

I don’t think that we’ve got realistic near-term commercial reasons to settle on Mars.