There aren鈥檛 any human footprints on Mars yet, but there likely will be someday.

They probably won鈥檛 belong to Tesla head honcho and Mars colonization enthusiast Elon Musk, although there鈥檚 a decent chance his SpaceX rockets will carry the first expedition.

Then again, SpaceX could falter, and the first humans on Mars could come from NASA, or maybe some future European, Chinese, or Indian space program.

But what gets me is that right now, we literally get photos from Mars every single day. The Perseverance and Curiosity rovers send back multiple pictures every day 鈥� each picture coming from so far away it takes minutes just to transmit the data, at lightspeed 鈥� giving us shot after shot of another planet.

That鈥檚 amazing.

What鈥檚 more amazing is that the photos are easily accessible. They鈥檙e online for anyone to see!

Heck, both rovers have Twitter accounts!

Other Twitter accounts relentlessly spit out picture after picture, showing us the rusty red and tan rocks and sand of another planet.

In my lifetime, we鈥檝e gone from a few relatively grainy black and white images of Mars, to colour photos from orbit, to a series of increasingly sophisticated landers that now bombard us with image after image.

It鈥檚 still amazing to consider that all this comes from another planet, millions of miles away, on which no human being has yet set foot.

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I was born after the last human being had set foot on the moon, but it鈥檚 likely that within my lifetime, humans will return to manned space exploration, visit the moon again, and then Mars.

And then what?

We may or may not stay.

If you think we need to have permanent Mars colonies, then the logical question is why we aren鈥檛 colonizing Antarctica, or the floor of the ocean, or building floating cities that hover in our atmosphere (which has been seriously suggested as a method for colonizing the acidic and searingly hot cloudscape of Venus).

At least if you step outside on Antarctica, you can breathe! We鈥檝e got a lot of space left right here where there鈥檚 air and water and a lot less of that pesky cosmic radiation and you don鈥檛 have to use multiple safety protocols to go for a short walk.

In the short term (by which I mean the next 500 to 1,000 years) colonizing Mars may be too difficult to be worthwhile. Moving vast numbers of humans there as a kind of lifeboat if the Earth gets snuffed out is a Plan B, I guess, but I鈥檇 rather we focused first on making sure that Earth survives.

But that said, I hope we send some humans for a visit.

You can鈥檛 extinguish the wonder of the fact that there are other planets. A few hundred years ago, they were blurry lights in the sky, and with telescopes and probes and rovers, we鈥檝e filled in the details.

Someday, probably soon, someone will hear the crunch of Martian sand under their feet.