There was something about the way those first European settlers were valorized by the proponents of Mars colonization, at a time in which migrants from countries suffering the effects of political violence and climate change were relentlessly villainized, that felt to me like an intimation of a future in which a tiny minority of obscenely wealthy people were free to colonize other planets, mine asteroids, escape the smoldering wreckage of the Earth, while the poor and the desperate would be made to seem like invading armies, barbarian hordes.
