When there is a viable artificial alternative, in this case space habitats, I think terraforming is inexcusable.

Okay, but why? Particularly in the case of Mars, which doesn't presently have an extant ecosystem.

Why increase the productive capacity of Mars if there is literally no reason to?

I mean people usually do not engage in extremely expensive infrastructure projects for the meme of it. That's precisely why NASA said that we can't do it, and should bother. The question is why you have a moral, rather than simply practical objection to this?

I mean, "Nature" is a dialectic all in itself. It is at once both the ultimate origin of the human species, and everything with which we sustain & furnish ourselves; and at the same time it is the origin of every disease that would harm us, and of every condition & necessity that allows for one person to hold dominion over & abuse another. For that reason, it would be unwise not to attempt to make ourselves the masters of it.

But I would disagree that there is a "dialectic" between the "natural", and the "unnatural". That's a position born either out of theology, or of pastoral romanticism. Instead one might say that there is a dialectic between those things which are the product of human society distinctly, and those things which are not, but both are in fact contained within the broader scope of the Natural.

We do not increas the productive capacity of a given piece of land - we only go through successive decreases in productivity that we attempt to mitigate through new technological methods.

That's patently not true. If it were, then the general population of human beings on Earth would've remained steady since the dawn of agriculture, which even before the "industrial revolution" proper it hadn't.

Your second point about terraforming a dead planet being more expensive than it's worth, and being more-or-less impossible under current conditions (the whole point of the article in OP) I would tend to agree with though.

Ooh, jurisdictional disputes among the nobility are always a great sign for civil society.

Imagine playing Vicky3 and not leading Great Qing to a Century of Triumph

Counterargument though- billionaires, land first, then live(?) on there.

I like the vision, but I think just shooting them out of a cannon is probably going to achieve the same desired results with less expenditure.

It's vandalism of the natural world.

That can be said about literally any endeavor to increase the productive capacity of a given piece of land though...

This isn't a Marxist/Materialist position, is what I'm getting at.

I was gonna say that they did make Lex Luthor a billionaire tech-bro asshole in the Superman movie, but then I also remembered that his opposition to Superman was out of a commitment to a bizarre interpretation of reddit-atheism, and didn't have anything to do with competing visions of the social good.