Spreading life to Mars is a project which forces humanity to confront the fundamental requirements of Architecture which have been lost in the complex interactions between humans and matter.
The property which distinguishes Architecture from other kinds of matter is the fact that Architecture is matter which has been configured to contain life. In this fundamental sense, Architecture contains life, protects life, and allows life to propogate. Architecture is a membrane which filters the conditions of the environment into a habitable condition for the kind of life which built it.
The extreme environment of Mars will require the utmost care in life support systems integration, and renewal, in order to sustain life. Furthermore, these systems have to be manufactured from resources found on Mars.
Frugality, Function and Endurance will reign supreme. These factors are the properties which will constrain the development of Architecture on Mars. Under the umbrella of these factors, issues of life support, psycological factors, matierality, and manufacture must all be considered for the Architecture to function as it role of supporting and propagating life.
Here on Earth, Architecture produced by Humans has turned away from providing these fundamental requirements of Architecture because we have achieved such control of our enviornment that those requirements are apparently not important anymore.
This is completely false, the Architecture we build today causes Humans to develope cancer (asbestos) due to its materiality, it causes generations to degrade mentally (lack of motivation and creativity in youth), it causes a mad frenzy of consumerism, and worst of all it leads us to believe that humans exist on earth to live our thier lives for whatever pleasure they can extract from the resources found here on earth. In general, the built environment is degenerating our civilzation because it is built on a foundation of consumption rather than the propogation of life.
The only way to reverse this degeneration is to start building in way which supports life and helps to propagate it. This is the right thing to do because that is the fundamental principle of life; to propagate itself.
