I have indeed read the book you referenced, at least as much as I could stomach. They're quite ill informed, and we can get into that but first on a couple of points you mentioned:
To start with Mars has practically endless water. That's rather evident on the poles, but we discovered back in 2013 that even the 'desert-like' images you associate with Mars, the surface regolith is surprisingly moist at somewhere between 1.5-5% water by weight. So a typical analog given there is that if you heated about a cubic foot of soil, you'd be able to evaporate out upwards of 2 pints (or 1 liter) of water. So the whole plot in "The Martian" about these esoteric things he had to do to just get water was just based on ignorance, which was the state of knowledge prior to 2013. Of course humans on the surface would have discovered this in a matter of minutes, but we're relying on probes and rovers - so instead it took us half a century.
Similarly, radiation on the surface of Mars is somewhat less than what astronauts are the ISS are exposed to. The huge numbers you're referencing are probably either from stuff like that book you mentioned, which is wrong about most of everything it claims and/or equivalently being quite misleading by e.g. referencing exposure levels during flight from a direct solar flare, which would indeed be quite toasty - but is something that can be easily worked around. Water itself, which we'll need to bring plenty of, works as an excellent radiation shield.
Near to every argument made in your referenced book, at least to the point that I was able to read, is mostly uninformed and/or disingenuous, but this already getting quite a bit longer than I intended. If you're into reading things that don't just confirm your biases then I might recommend this [1] book instead. And it's written by an aerospace engineer with an extensive background of research into the topic, instead of a comic book artist. That's not an appeal to authority, as there are plenty of people with no background in space who are extremely well informed. But it's also true that those who are misinformed, universally, have no relevant background in space.
According to [0], there's about 2% water by volume in Martian soil, and you need to heat it up to 800 degrees Celsius to extract it -- which means you need a power source capable of generating those temperatures on an ongoing basis, which is unlikely without massive solar arrays that would be constant covered with (and damaged by) Martian regolith. Oh, and Mars receives less than half the sunlight Earth does due to its greater distance from the sun, and dust storms could obscure them for weeks on end.
Or you could use hypothetical a nuclear power power plant that would be incredibly expensive to build, ship, run and maintain on a foreign planet.
You were right about the radiation! Kind of. There's "only" 50x more radiation on Mars' surface than on Earth's. You said this was less than what astronauts on the ISS are exposed to. How is that a meaningful comparison? You're talking about people living their entire lives in this environment, and presumably making babies who grow into adolescents and adults, all the while threatened by an amount of radiation we have no idea if a human child could live through.
The atmosphere on Mars is so thin that exposure to it will kill you. The level of radiation is so high that exposure to it will kill you, unless you lived essentially your entire life underground or in a bunker. The cold temperatures will kill you. The soil has perchlorate in concentrations that will kill you. There's basically nothing to do there -- no walks outside without a space suit, no nature to look at, no living beings (except perhaps soil microbes that would be instantly destroyed in the process of extracting water) -- nothing more available there than here on Earth except looking at the stars and dying. [1]
Every argument I've seen people make for colonizing Mars in the near term has been emotional. The arguments are all the more emotional for insisting that they are rational. We have no idea if we could grow food in a closed system indefinitely, or reproduce in space or on another planet, and the amount of research going into these literally existential questions is close to zero. Nor do the billionaires who claim to be obsessed with getting us to be a multi-planet civilization seem to give a shit about them. Colonizing Mars isn't a plan; it's a meme.
Finally, there's no thought given to how to deal with inevitable social problems that will arise if there are large (1000+) populations away from Earth: what to do with people who have psychological breakdowns? how do you prioritize if more people need to be sent home than there's space for on a return rocket? what are your responsibilities toward colonists who need expensive permanent care? what if they can't survive Earth's gravity due to physiological changes from growing up off-planet? What if an entire space colony will never be self-sustaining and they need to be supported with expensive shipments of food and supplies from Earth forever -- who will pay? Or will we?
Look, if you want to colonize Mars or other planets because you think it's a cool thing to do, at least that's an honest, personal opinion. But if you think putting a ton of resources into going to Mars anytime soon is a good investment -- when we aren't even mitigating an ongoing climate disaster here on Earth, the one environment to which we are exquisitely adapted and which is non-existent literally anywhere else in the known universe -- then you are fooling yourself.
I'm trying to keep this engaging/holistic and avoiding writing a rambling wall of text, but I also don't want to just cherry pick stuff. So if you think I'm ignoring something or whatever, please do feel free to point to it. I can certainly elaborate on just about anything on this topic. I find all of it quite fascinating and enjoyable to discuss (or debate)!
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Let me start with your water issue. It varies by area - the 2% came from Curiosity's region bearing in mind it moves at an aggregate rate of about about 1.5 miles per year. The up to 5% came from measurements from other devices on different parts of the planet. And in this goofy digital world we've created I think we're falling increasingly out of touch with the real world, and what we're capable of. You are implying generating 800C of heat is some technological issue yet a typical medieval style open forge and bellows can easily reach temperatures upwards of 1200C. Suffice to say there's a bit more refined methods developed in the past millennia!
The reason radiation levels matter is because radiation can do one of two things. If you have low enough radiation, then the worst you're looking at is something like a reduced life expectancy owing to increased rates of cancer. But high radiation can give you radiation poisoning and kill you in hours. Mars is much more of the former than the latter. For instance there's even one really interesting area on Earth - Ramsar, Iran. [1] It's a small town of a couple of thousand that has significant ambient radiation levels, with some smaller areas within it even experiencing higher than typical levels on Mars. You'd naturally expect that to, at the minimum, lead to increased rates of cancer but it based on limited data not only does this not seem to be the case, but there may already be radio-adaptive effects in play. It's phenomenally interesting!
The thing I'd make of this (and the water on Mars) issue is that it's impossible to know what you don't know. And right now we know basically nothing about colonizing other planets and ultimately I think the only way we're really going to find out more is by actually doing it. So for instance obviously fertility will be crucial, but all the experiments you do on Earth or the ISS aren't ever going to give you a definitive answer. You're only going to find out on Mars by actually doing it. And I think this applies to many of the issues you're mentioning.
The idea of trying to just work out everything at home, and then have everything go perfectly is what I would call the meme. It just doesn't work in the real world. This is precisely how SpaceX was able to go from a relatively broke startup to dominating the entire space industry. They worked towards the goal and tried their best along the way, but didn't let the possibility of failure get in the way of achieving success. And they ended up with not only the most efficient rockets in the world, but also have the best safety record as well. Kind of paradoxical in a way, but I think it also makes sense. In poker the best way to ensure you lose money is to try to avoid losing money. When fear of failure dominates your thought processes you, at some point, become incapable of making the best decisions.
I think some of the issues you bring up (as well as in the book you mentioned) are issues brought up just to have issues to bring up. So for instance, what happens if somebody goes crazy? To me this question is banal, because I just don't see there being any real discussion to be had. Obviously they'd immediately be locked up to ensure the safety of everybody else, and they'd be deported back to Earth at the first opportunity. Maybe there's some interesting nuance or whatever in these issues, but I'm not seeing it?
I'm going to keep this conversation going because it's interesting to me, if no one else here.
As to reaching 800+ Celsius: This is a solved problem on Earth because we have an effectively unlimited supply of oxygen and fuel. Neither of these conditions is true on Mars, unless you count the (very toxic to humans!) perchlorate in the soil. Extracting potable water from Martian soil would be a non-trivial task just in terms of energy needs, much less the task of making the water safe to drink.
The radiation issue is a bigger deal than you let on. I did not know about Ramsar. It's interesting! But this is a town of only 2000 with people who may have adapted to its higher levels of background radiation over generations. Our hypothetical Mars colonists will not have that luxury. And Ramsar has, on average, "only" 10x more radiation than we have on Earth -- still only 1/5th what we'd have on the surface of Mars.
I'd also point out that you seem pretty blase about the long-term risks of radiation. If we're talking about real colonization, we have to consider the risks of literal, multiple lifetimes of radiation -- not just how it might affect an average person over the course of a few years or decades.
> The idea of trying to just work out everything at home, and then have everything go perfectly is what I would call the meme
I apologize if it seems like I'm saying we need everything worked out. That is a miscommunication on my part. But we need some working prototype of what could work -- which we don't. We've never even succeeded in building a self-sustaining closed system on Earth! Where it should be easy! Because it's actually really really hard! And the craziest part is, literally no one is even trying!
If we can't make a self-sustaining closed system work here there is no reason to believe we could do it on another planet. I know SpaceX is everyone's favorite model of "go fast and break stuff", but there's many reasons why that does not apply to space colonization. The obvious first reason is that blowing up a rocket is not as serious as accidentally killing a space colony.
Another is the (imo mistaken) belief that rocked design is analogous to space colonization. I'd hazard that space colonization is maybe 1000x more difficult than designing a real big rocket -- which is admittedly very hard! But there are a bunch of extremely important and difficult questions that advocates for space travel -- maybe even you -- seem totally uninterested in solving and hand-wave away.
Resources will be scarce on a space colony, at least for the foreseeable future. What if a baby is born with a pathology that makes their care too expensive? Will they be left to die? Or will they have a right to live indefinitely? Will their parents be forced to get sterilized -- or have future fetuses aborted -- if they are at risk of producing more children with the same pathology? Who decides who gets sent home? It's simple if someone has an extreme psychic break with reality. But what if it's someone with severe depression? Or borderline personality disorder? Will the colony get to vote people off the island like the ancient Greeks sent people into exile? And what if a trip home might kill the person in question -- a particular risk for people who are born on Mars and never experienced gravity on Earth? Do future colonists have the right to give people an effective death sentence for being mentally ill?
These are obviously problems that exists here on Earth! But the consequences are entirely less dire here. A person with severe schizophrenia can live on the streets here in the US and pretty much no one gives a shit. But if this happens on Mars, and that person is using resources that are already in short supply (think of a world where there's only enough water to shower for a few minutes a week, or to subsist on only a bare minimum number of calories), people are going to care a lot. What happens next?
On Mars a critical part of civilization will be the Sabatier Reaction. [1] It's a chemical reaction between CO2, which is widely abundant on Mars, and hydrogen. It yields methane and water. Things like this are so unbelievably convenient that it makes life almost feel like a video game where Mars is clearly just level 2. We'll need to start with a base amount of hydrogen, but getting more is also pretty straight forward using electrolysis, even directly on briny surface waters, the pure water from the reaction, or whatever other source. It's plentiful. So basic energy/water sources will be practically infinite.
The reason I'm largely dismissive of things like radiation is twofold. The first is because we don't "really" know what the effects will be. It's not like we've intentionally exposed healthy people, in a large enough sample, to ever increasing radiation and then measured the effects. What we do know comes from observational studies which are going to provide weak and likely confounded evidence, and/or animal studies. The other is because life expectancy on Mars isn't going to be high. There will be significant numbers of deaths during colonization because there always are. Even simple construction projects tend to involve deaths and we're speaking of a major construction project done on another planet in circumstances we have no experience in whatsoever. The conclusion one can come to from the radiation is that people probably won't have an 80 year life expectancy, but that was already very much a given.
Mars also will not be self sustaining for at least on the order of decades. The earliest experiments will obviously be geared towards 'in situ resource utilization' (ISRU) like scaling the Sabatier reaction, creating our own food, and so on - but these will be experiments and not necessities. The first voyages will bring enough food and other supplies to provide for survival and departure (and then some), independent of local resources, within the typical 2 years time frame. Ideally everything will go according to plan, but in reality it almost certainly will go wrong from day 0, and so that will be the assumption. The first habs themselves will also simply be the rockets we're landing in.
The other questions I again just don't see as particularly relevant, even moreso in the context of a scenario where death will probably be a rather more frequent visitor than on Earth. They're also mostly happy problems. By the time you're trying to decide how to e.g. treat offspring with obscure birth defects, colonization has already been a booming success, and we'll leave it up to the Martians to do what they think is in their best collective interest. It's very likely that different value systems will emerge on the different settlements of humans, and I think this is a very good thing. Trying to impose our values on systems that are unlike anything we have experience of would simply be both arrogant and naive.
To start with Mars has practically endless water. That's rather evident on the poles, but we discovered back in 2013 that even the 'desert-like' images you associate with Mars, the surface regolith is surprisingly moist at somewhere between 1.5-5% water by weight. So a typical analog given there is that if you heated about a cubic foot of soil, you'd be able to evaporate out upwards of 2 pints (or 1 liter) of water. So the whole plot in "The Martian" about these esoteric things he had to do to just get water was just based on ignorance, which was the state of knowledge prior to 2013. Of course humans on the surface would have discovered this in a matter of minutes, but we're relying on probes and rovers - so instead it took us half a century.
Similarly, radiation on the surface of Mars is somewhat less than what astronauts are the ISS are exposed to. The huge numbers you're referencing are probably either from stuff like that book you mentioned, which is wrong about most of everything it claims and/or equivalently being quite misleading by e.g. referencing exposure levels during flight from a direct solar flare, which would indeed be quite toasty - but is something that can be easily worked around. Water itself, which we'll need to bring plenty of, works as an excellent radiation shield.
Near to every argument made in your referenced book, at least to the point that I was able to read, is mostly uninformed and/or disingenuous, but this already getting quite a bit longer than I intended. If you're into reading things that don't just confirm your biases then I might recommend this [1] book instead. And it's written by an aerospace engineer with an extensive background of research into the topic, instead of a comic book artist. That's not an appeal to authority, as there are plenty of people with no background in space who are extremely well informed. But it's also true that those who are misinformed, universally, have no relevant background in space.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars