Personally I just accept that us humans are here to explore: as opposed to overbuilding and over populating what we have been given to manage.
In the long run we may place humans on Mars and that will be significant but for what purpose? The greatest feedback we received from going to the moon was the photograph of our beautiful and distant Earth as it arose from behind our Moon.
Even today that picture gives us an instant understanding of our fragile domicile. When the photo is observed with deep reflection our squabbles here at home reveal their silliness.
While we wait and prepare for human occupation of Mars and even other solid globes in our galaxy we would not be wasting resources if we do simpler task such as placing photo equipment that would give us constant earth views as seen from those perspectives. The 24/7 opportunities would give us different orientations of ourselves as we assign importance to our basic needs: maybe even the importance of ourselves would be massaged. A return to our Moon to place a simple earth monitoring camera should also be part of the program.
Even if we are alone in the universe we should emphasize that fact until revelations of different knowledge is passed onto to us.
A Bit: Here & There 