Originally a comment by iknklast on Some other workable plan.

As for transporting enough stuff – no. Doing a wetland restoration, I had to transport ‘stuff’ halfway across Oklahoma…a modern state (sort of) with the ability to stop for gas and water plants, etc etc etc. More than half the plants died. It was a five hour trip (usually three, but because of the frequent stops, it took longer).

What we were transporting would be going into a similar system, where there was adequate water, nutrients, and sunlight, and once upon a time was an established system. After the transplant, about half the remaining plants died. Our success rate was low, and we didn’t really have any truly adverse circumstances.

You can’t just ‘transport plants’ or ‘transport seeds’. They need other things…water, of course. Soil. But also, fungus. Particular fungus which associates with plant roots. But you can’t take them with the fungus, because the roots have to be sterilized so a system isn’t messed up by other things invading, so you have to inject the fungus after planting. I realize they would probably say they are taking seeds, but seeds also need the fungus, which the system provides when they get to the proper stage in their development. Mars wouldn’t have that.

You would need pollinators. Humans can fill that role, but it is slow and tedious, and slow and tedious doesn’t strike me as something Musk does.

Plants also require a particular day length before they will germinate. Mars does not have the same day lengths we do. Plants can evolve to different temperatures, different soils, different water regimes, different wave lengths, but it doesn’t happen fast enough to support a colony on Mars.

We were dealing with a small system, and only a very small part of that small system. It ran far over budget, and in the end, was only marginally successful. The cost for colonizing Mars is likely to be so high you could probably save every ecosystem on Earth for the money…and have some left over. And restoring damaged ecosystem has at least some probability of success. On Mars, it is zero.

There was an instructor in my writing program who was writing a book on the future of the moon. He was going through all this high tech stuff, etc, and how we would be colonizing the moon, mining asteroids for minerals, etc. I asked him if he had talked to any scientists. Oh yes, he says. I talked to a couple of astronauts and some psychologists who work with astronauts. Really? No biologists? No physicists? No chemists? No geologists?

People like the high tech ideas of colonizing other planets/moons. The day to day work of maintaining a livable system bores them, so they brush it away. I don’t care how many spaceships we are able to get to the moon or other planets, there is a need for a lot more thought about the science before the fools rush in (though if Musk would take Trump with him, I would gladly contribute part of my taxes for the trip).