Saying it that way makes it sound like a new retirement community. Why not say he would like to live on Mars? Maybe because it's a dead planet and not very livable.
I think the point is that he knows while he still has many years of his life ahead of him, eventually he'll be faced with mortality, and when that time comes, he would like to have pushed humankind's ability to reach Mars to the point where he could step foot there, live for awhile, and eventually be buried there.
> Why not say he would like to live on Mars? Maybe because it's a dead planet and not very livable.
One could grow plants on Mars. It has close to a 24 hour day-night cycle, and enough sunlight. Growing plants on continental agricultural scales is infeasible with artificial light, but on Earth and Mars, you don't need that. All you need are pressurized greenhouses, and you could have full-blown agriculture on Mars. The industrial processes for creating polymer films from Martian resources on Mars to enable this have already been worked out.
With some genetic engineering, we might not even need the greenhouses.
