NASA astronauts have only managed to live continuously on the International Space Station (ISS) for a year and Biosphere 2 on Earth failed at two years of uninterrupted human habitation. Both cases required extracting the sickened people from the toxic environments. At this point it is ludicrous to talk about a permanent manned base on Mars.

In the future, it may turn out that fossil fuels are the blood of the Earth and by extracting them may lead to serious consequences to the Earth's survival, and by association, that of the humans.