Why would anyone want to live on Mars?

mars cannot hold an atmosphere, or reflect the solar wind - it seems like a dead end, unless folks lived under a lead-lined shield and manufactured its water & oxygen from the rocks, somehow.

here's the problem with mars :

Mars has only a thin atmosphere now, and that atmosphere isn’t thick enough to maintain water now. So it must have had a thicker, warmer atmosphere in the past. And that atmosphere could only have persisted if Mars also had a protective magnetosphere.

Astronomers are pretty certain that Mars lost its magnetosphere about 4 billion of years ago. And without a protective magnetosphere like Earth has, the stellar wind from the Sun had free access to Mars, and simply stripped its atmosphere away, lost to space forever.

And once that happened, Mars was doomed. The water and atmosphere disappeared, and Mars got cold and dry.

Earth’s magnetosphere is created by a dynamo at the planet’s core; a rotating and convective clump of molten iron and nickel. Mars must have had one, too. It’s the only way it could’ve generated a protective magnetosphere to shield it from the Sun. But Mars is smaller than Earth, and following its formation, the planet cooled more quickly than Earth did. Once it cooled, it lost its core iron/nickel dynamo, then its atmosphere, then its water. Poor Mars.

https://www.universetoday.com/146277/mars-doesnt-have-much-of-a-magnetosphere-but-heres-a-map/

mars has no appreciable magnetosphere, cannot hold an atmosphere or retain water or slough off cosmic radiation.

any colony would have to live under a radiation shield, manufacture water, oxygen and energy from the rocks

its a tall order, probably millennia away from any feasibility.

The ultimate goal is to geoengineer Mars into a second Earth. Can you imagine the beaches and turquoise water on Mars?