Your probability of dying on Mars is much higher than earth. Really, the ad for going to Mars would be like Shackleton's ad for going to the Antarctic: "It's gonna be hard. There's a good chance of death, going in a little can through deep space. You might land successfully. Once you land successfully, you'll be working nonstop to build the base."

I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket - half a million dollars. It can be done.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable.

I realized that a methane-oxygen rocket engine could achieve a specific impulse greater than 380.

Nuke Mars refers to a continuous stream of very low fallout nuclear fusion explosions above the atmosphere to create artificial suns. Much like our sun, this would not cause Mars to become radioactive.