If you look deep enough you will find that even life on Earth is meaningless. Our very existence is just a ride on a blue-green rock inside a meat suit.
For a more 'down-to-earth' answer, we can look into the past - how did the space race, landing on the moon, etc contribute to the development of science, technology, art...
Did that have anything to do with our development as a species ?
If we manage to settle on Mars, that would mean a great deal of new technological and scientific discoveries - which we'll be able to apply here on Earth. Maybe the solutions for the problems we experience here on Earth lay on other planets ?
Other planets will follow and eventually other stars. There will probably be generations of people who live and grow on a space ship, watching space youtube and movies all their lives - set in a strange distant place called Earth.
Eventually, they will arrive on a planet far away and settle there - maybe they'll forget all about their space trip and technology - become farmers and raise space chicken - only to reinvent rockets once again thousands of years later.
I think there are definitely a small minority with the 'explorer gene', who are keen to be on the frontier. But most of us (if we're really honest with ourselves) would find it too hard to live on Mars in the next 50 years (say). Being so far away from home, simple things like the lack of internet, your surroundings being mile after mile of this : https://go.nasa.gov/2p4TKrK.
I think realistically most of the people who first colonise mars will be doing it for financial reasons, because better options are not available to them on Earth.
They're not going to let random hobos move to Mars. Anyone that would be accepted for that mission would have perfectly adequate financial options available to them on Earth.
Lack of internet seems like an overly pessimistic view. We have a connection with Mars already, streaming high quality media and other data back to us. Having actual people on Mars would only increase the demand for better internet connectivity and I see no reason why that connectivity won't be improved.
Sure the delay fluctuates between 5-25 minutes, so you won't be enjoying any realtime activities like voice calls or playing Quake. [1] Initially bandwidth will probably also be too low to casually download 4K cat videos. However there won't be any issue with setting up a local Mars community web proxy that downloads HN & friends in compressed batches. There are a lot of things to do on the internet where even a 25 minute delay is no biggie.
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[1] Although it shouldn't take too long until there are enough local people on Mars for low latency activities among themselves.
For a more 'down-to-earth' answer, we can look into the past - how did the space race, landing on the moon, etc contribute to the development of science, technology, art... Did that have anything to do with our development as a species ?
If we manage to settle on Mars, that would mean a great deal of new technological and scientific discoveries - which we'll be able to apply here on Earth. Maybe the solutions for the problems we experience here on Earth lay on other planets ?
Other planets will follow and eventually other stars. There will probably be generations of people who live and grow on a space ship, watching space youtube and movies all their lives - set in a strange distant place called Earth.
Eventually, they will arrive on a planet far away and settle there - maybe they'll forget all about their space trip and technology - become farmers and raise space chicken - only to reinvent rockets once again thousands of years later.
Maybe this whole thing is inside our DNA ?