Mars Colony to Humanity = child to you.

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One idea developed at 3 different levels of depth and complexity.
Level 1: TL;DR 
Level 2: Abstract
Level 3: The whole, detailed thing

LEVEL I

A Mars Colony to Humanity is like a child to you.

LEVEL II

If you are willing to spend 10+% of your time and resources raising your child, you should be extremely enthousiastic about colonizing Mars.
How much would it cost to 'raise' Mars?


LEVEL III

Cost analysis of a Mars Colony - How much would it cost to 'raise' Mars? 

Optimistic estimate:
One standard number for the number of inhabitants of a self-sustaining, 'adult' colony is one Million people. One Starship can accomodate 100 people. Not accounting for deaths and births (assuming they will be approximately equal), that means 10 000 Starship flights for people only. These flights will have cargo, too , so let's assume that those 10 000 flights can deliver the seeds of sustainable life to Mars.
This basically means that Starships will be mass produced, which will naturally decrease their cost significantly. Elon Musk's figure is USD 200 000 per person, which amounts to USD 20 Million per flight. 10 000 times that is USD 200 Billion. Vladimir Putin has that much cash. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates put together have that cash. It is a ridiculously low amount of money. NASA has a yearly budget of USD 20 Billion. In 10 years they could be on Mars?

Let's be a bit more skeptic about the technology and pessimistic about the price.
Let's suppose it is going to cost 100 times as much! Maybe, there will have to be 5 times more flights and they are going to cost 20 times more. Maybe. And a Mars Colony will have no economic return.

Then the price of 'raising' Mars amounts to USD 20 Trillion.
How much is 20 Trillion? It's the 2018 GDP of the USA.
It is, however, not the net US federal income, which is only USD 3.5 Trillion.
So even if we are super pessimistic, the USA could finance the Mars Colonization project at 1% of its annual GDP for 100 years. (ie. USD 200 Billion or 5.7% of the federal budget.)

Again, this is assuming the absolute worst prices and no economical return to society.
All that USD 200 Billion would be obviously spent on Earth and real businesses would get that money, which could employ people. For comparison, the US spends USD 650 Billion on its military yearly.









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