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To start, scientific/exploration bases make a good deal of sense. A post-Apollo scientific/exploration base on the moon would have made good sense, although the politics of the time precluded it. It depends on what-all you finally find as to whether something more might be warranted. You can't find it (whatever it is!), if you don't go look. And planting a flag and putting a few surface rocks in a bag is NOT "looking" in the sense that I am talking about here. We NEVER actually explored the moon.
In history, folks like Columbus and Hudson didn't just look at one location, they landed and looked around as best they could in several locations. They found good enough agricultural resources here and there that some others began to think of colonies with trade as a long-term investment. Some of those attempted colonies didn't pan out well, because they didn't take enough care to find the right spot.
Some didn't make it at all. Raleigh's lost colony was one, and Jamestown was almost another. But over the centuries, the colonies that were located in survivable spots figured out what crops they could export, and the trade network grew, in spite of the tremendous difficulties at the beginning of this process just sailing across the Atlantic.
Colonies in space or on other bodies will be more difficult for us today than those colonies were for our ancestors back then. That's because space, the moon, Mars, etc. has no life-supportable environments, along with the lack of infrastructure our ancestors faced in the New World. You can't just hitch up a plow to your rover and start farming on the moon or Mars, while you could in the right spots in the New World, given a horse or an ox as your "rover".
But, on the moon or Mars, you just might experiment with doing what it takes to make life support possible, at your scientific/exploration base. You would do it without a clear path to a colony, but with the faith that as technologies improve, your descendants might want to try. That's just what science/exploration does.
These colony things are best done as a sort of bootstrap / piggyback process. You start with the research/exploration base. If something crops up that justifies it, more will grow slowly from the worthwhile scientific / exploration base. If nothing crops up, no point trying to grow a colony there.
The pitfall is that no two sites are ever alike. Moon, Mars, Earth, or any other name, you want to investigate multiple sites on each place before you ever decide what might be colonizable and what isn't. That answer shifts somewhat as technologies improve, too. Politicians like to hip-shoot from too small a sample, and they give up too easy because of high price tags. History says not to do it that way.
Long term, places like Mars might even prove to be terraformable. Who knows? We sure don't, not today.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2017-01-21 16:39:21)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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We will only colonize space after we have colonized Antarctica and the ocean.
This really will not work as the Antartica is a shared island continent for science and the Ocean. I actually have this topic here for reference but there are issues with making that happen, as how do you avoid unexpected drop ins when you try to create you space under the waters surface or even on top. The both need what seems to be at a personal level requiring an endless cash supply to pull off.
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