The first problems of autonomous and human-friendly colonies on Mars are forces, shelter, water, oxygen, and food. Unless you have these problems under reliable and sustainable control, you do not have too many colonies, only "quiet bases" are the colonies of the month! Lol
Housing is relatively easy. Automatic "boring company" import excavator and start digging! Ideally, we can find some soft but dense Martian rock formations. And it will be an ideal matrix for underground cities. These residential caves may be underground power generation drilling machines of only a few meters and future electricity demand, perhaps several small nuclear reactors will probably be developed, probably one of the larger nuclear reactors used in submarines It will be updated to be on Mars Run in the environment
After the excavator completes the tunnel of hundreds of meters, the tunnel can be sealed and the electricity from the reactor to generate O 2, nitrogen, etc. to pressurize the caverns with water ice or suitable minerals It is used to electrolyze. The excavator reexamines the reservoir and reactor heat storage. Then the drilling machine may be responsible for digging more water ice to fill the reservoir
Once you become healthy, the reservoir is hidden safely in the reservoir. Retry the excavator again to make a series of surface grooves. These grooves are pressurized to the colonial original garden covered with plastic coins for food production purposes, and the second purpose is to generate additional O 2 from photosynthesis.
Somewhere in this time series, the first cave may be sealed and pressurized, and it may replace the automated structure with some Martian settlers and some Tesla "Marsmobiles" To continue
When intensively producing dozens of acres of agricultural land under the dome, watering, nuclear reactor-driven "growing lights", the settlers hop on their Tesla SUV and start searching for real economic reasons for their existence I can!
On 27th September 2016, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced his Martian colonization program. His goal is a self-sustaining colony with a population of 1 million and introduced the conceptual design of a spaceship capable of achieving this goal - Mars Colony Transport Vehicle (MCT). MCT will be the most powerful spaceship in human history. It not only brings a lot of payload to Mars, it can be reused like any other SpaceX rocket. After landing on Mars and unloading the cargo, the spacecraft can refuel and prepare for the next destination, perhaps not the Earth.
The SpaceX Mars mission is ambitious at least. It will establish an autonomous colony that is the key. By the middle of the 21st century, many organizations have the potential to send people to Mars, but SpaceX will proceed to the next step. They did not start from expedition, but they sent permanent residents from the first day. Crazy is that there is a reasonable possibility that they succeed. By the end of this century they want to have one million permanent colonies on our red sister's planet. If you would like more information on this topic, please visit here to better understand the obstacles that may be considered opportunities.
The usefulness of this symbiotic relationship between plants and humans will become evident when that is to build a completely autonomous colony on Mars. The fact that nature designed an effective process for converting human excreta into a useful form is a property we can not ignore. Designing a unique way to handle these unwanted byproducts without using plants will only increase the complexity and cost of colonization efforts on Mars.