Well I guess we're lucky there have been quite a few advances in helping plant and other forms of life survive in the past 200,000 years so. It's not like we're dropping a bunch of naked humans on the surface of Mars and expecting them to live off the land.
Mars is a gigantic frigid rock. You can't eat it, you can't breathe it, and you can't touch it.
If you go to mars, you're going to be living in a bubble and it hardly even matters whether you're on Mars at that point (aside from being close enough to study it.) You could just as well colonize the bottom of the ocean or Antarctica, and there's plenty of value in doing those things because the rewards from the efforts could easily be transported back to normal society. And if you get sick or injured, you can still survive rather than casting your valuable experience into the void.
If the advances you speak of can't help you survive in Earth's mildly hostile uninhabited environments, then you can't expect them to work on Mars.
We are colonizing Antarctica. There are permanent settlements there. The bottom of the ocean has a different set of challenges than Mars due to the pressure, but sure we could do that too. We have 7.5 billion people here, you know, we don't all have to work on the same thing.
