I've started reading A City On Mars and the interesting thing is that the authors clearly set out to write a different book than they ended up with. It was supposed to be "space colonization is super cool and here's how it would work!" but somewhere along the way they became convinced that space colonization is, in fact, completely pointless at this stage in history.
They make a couple points, but the one that really gets me is:
Apart from studying Mars itself, what could you accomplish on a Mars colony that you couldn't in Antarctica?
Either way, you're dependent on regular shipments from the productive parts of Earth for the forseeable future--there is a greenhouse at the South Pole, but it's only a tiny supplement to the imported food that makes up the other 95% of the crew's diet, and it needs consumable supplies that also have to be imported.
And either way, you're not really living in a wide-open wilderness; you're living in a very small indoor space where even windows are a cautiously allocated luxury. Feel the thrill of exploring... all the way from the canteen to the lavatory and back again. At least in Antarctica it's possible to go outdoors.
Like don't get me wrong, I think it would be neat as hell to live in Antarctica, but... neat is all it is. It doesn't protect you from the impacts of catastrophes back at home, it doesn't set you up for expanding your base into a real population center. There's no future for humanity in Antarctica (anytime soon); the only utility is in doing kinds of research that can't be done elsewhere, plus maybe some degree of political dickwagging that there are Americans at the South Pole.
We might get an ISS-sized Mars outpost sometime (though even that would be exponentially more difficult and dangerous than the ISS, which is already the most expensive thing ever built), but the kind of self-sufficient settlement that makes humanity a meaningfully multiplanetary species? There's a lot more than political will standing between us and that possibility.
