A Mars base isn’t exactly necessary either. My point was that we should have such a base for quite a while before we send people to Mars where sending supplies or rescue will take months. There are so many things that can go wrong and the people there will have to deal with these problems on their own without external help.

And how is a colony on mars necessary?

I meant it was not necessary for the Antarctica station to be autonomous.

It’s about doing a test run there before we send people to Mars that have no backup plan when something goes wrong.

The Apollo missions had no backup plan. Neither did many great exploration expeditions in history.