Ways that have no realistic way of happening aren’t better ways.
Obviously we don’t send a group without making it not certain death first. But the person I was responding to said that it would be reliant on Earth, which, yeah, you can’t realistically develop a fully self reliant economy without making a reliant economy first.
Lunar seems more convenient for debugging colony creation than Martian, since the shipping time from Earth will be a whole lot shorter. Projects are a lot harder when trips to the hardware store take months rather than days.
I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable, once they iron out the issues, but I generally don't know enough to answer your second question.
I’m glad you are into the lunar colony. My biggest issue with the mars colony crowd is their disinterest in a much more practical lunar colony for us to cut our teeth on. Overall I feel like a lot of people are into colonies for aesthetic reasons. If it’s gonna 100-200 years before a colony could be self sustaining, then why are we treating multiplanetaryness as some kind of practical solution to current-day issues that appeared within the last century?
Presumably there’d be regular missions, so there’d be relatively little additional planning for a given moon trip, similar to how there’s a lot less planning/paperwork that goes into a Falcon 9 launch these days than there was for any rocket before Falcon 9.
Starship’s goal is to drop cost of mass to orbit by a couple of orders of magnitude, if they pull that off, it would drop the cost of supporting a colony by quite a bit.
Obviously we don’t send a group without making it not certain death first. But the person I was responding to said that it would be reliant on Earth, which, yeah, you can’t realistically develop a fully self reliant economy without making a reliant economy first.