None of those are self sustaining.
According to whom exactly? For me, permanent means "permanently without breaks".
The ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000. But it was not, in fact, expected by anyone to be a permanent station; It is made of non-replaceable parts that age and fail (decade scale), it only has very limited life support supplies on board (month scale).
No it doesn't. "Permanent settlement" just means it's not temporary, only intended for a short-term mission.
You don't want to be there? Almost every other place on earth is better. So you send a skeleton crew along with what they need.
If it is to test an actual community living isolated, sure. But I think it'll always be different because you know that help is at most a few months away and probably a lot less. I don't think you can fake that, unless you're never told you're not alone
When you are sending people to space on an experimental rocket, with experimental supply for an experimental habitat, all of that shit better be engineered to a huge safety factor, because its not a matter of if things will go wrong, its how often will they go wrong and what the impact will be. To deal with that kind of unknown requires a level of technology that should make it possible to live in Antarctica for extended period of time without any external shipments coming in to resupply. That means heating, oxygen generation, food resources, air filtration, full medical bay capable of advanced surgery, and a bunch of other smaller things that all matter in the end.
(eg any place on Earth is infinitely better than any place on Mars, maybe a couple of scientists are ready to endure Mars for a couple of months at a time, but beyond that? It will be like living in a labour camp in (frozen) hell.
There are skeptical arguments against Mars settlement but the Antarctica thing is kind of a weak one.
To point out one more problem with it: there’s legal and treaty restrictions in play for that continent. You can’t just go. That’s another limiting factor.
However put a reason to go to Mars, i.e. alien shipwreck and there is going to be multiple cities within end of the decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day
I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.
Supply runs to Mars will be in the range of 10000x as expensive, possibly even higher. Something that costs $100 to get to Antarctica will cost $1million to get to Mars. Permanent Mars settlement will entail a level of self-sufficiency that we haven't proven on a place that is comparitively balmy and has the benefit of a breathable atmosphere and abundant water (Antarctica). Not to mention radiation...
Don't hold your breath. I'm as much a fan of space colonization of as the next nerd, but it's premature.
