The dream of colonizing alien worlds has been a part of western culture for sixty-seventy years. Mars appears to be the most likely candidate for the first settlement. But with every major new piece of knowledge acquired about the Red Planet, the difficulty of such an endeavor increases a notch: radiation levels, hazardous dust, food cultivation and ecology, etc — everyday life gets more challenging than one would expect. A Mars colony appears to be the most complex engineering venture imagined so far and many technology hurdles remain to solve. We will get there, I am sure, but that will be many decades in the future. Whoever pretends otherwise is a charlatan.
Here is a long article that looks at some yet unsolved technological and psychological problems facing tentative Mars colonists and at some people that nevertheless dream of settling there pretty soon — link >>>
The first Mars colony will probably resemble the interiors of a submarine or an underground factory.
The Dream Forge 
Great point…most people think we’re just going to hop on a space shuttle and head on over. That’s a great article, didn’t know much about Mars One other than hearing about it in passing.
Mars One did get a lot of media attention here in Sweden when the project was “launched”. However, a Mars expedition is probably the most complex endeavor we can carry out at our current tech level, so these chaps are naive when they think that they would be able to do a successful “quick & dirty” one-way expedition. I hope to see a proper Mars expedition with two or three decades, but I am by no means sure that it will come true. It seems that new propulsion technology is needed to cut the transit time to a more endurable weeks instead of months. Perhaps a mix of chemical rockets and ion engines would do the trick, what do I know.