Once the initial transplant of those creatures is done, the rest is just maintaining the equipment to sustain them. That can all be done locally.
That's simply not true. Your body replicates cell constantly and errors happen all the time without any ill effect. It's only when a cell replication botches itself into a disease like cancer or leukemia that things go to hell in a hand basket. The same would apply to the probes. Lots of errors would simply have no effect, depending on what the error was. There also wouldn't always be an error on a replication, and if the materials last a very, very long time(and they would with a species that advanced), you'd only need a handful(if any, depending on material quality) replications.
Your body dies in a handful of decades, with all that replication. If those errors were so trivial, why do natural humans (i.e. humans without advanced medicines) die in about 40 years and even with the best of care, only live about 80 years for the most part?
Yep. I made that point several pages back.
So, a few hundreds of times longer than we have had civilization? This is supposed to be a criticism?
Why do they die?
Because you don't have a broad enough biodiversity. Because you cannot bring enough different species out of the gravity well of Earth, then modify them all enough to live on Mars. So the first bacterial mutation wipes out your entire species.
All you have to do to see that happening now is look at bananas. We've already wiped out one species of bananas and it looks like our current crops will be gone within a few decades.
Up to the point that you know their wild population is stable, you're keeping breeding populations in captivity on the side, to repopulate the species. You've been working out their needs in enclosed spaces (which you need to support the people until terraforming is done anyway) gradually moving them over to Mars surface conditions over the generations.
Because you only have so few strains of bees (as well as EVERY other living thing on the planet), your massively impoverished biosphere will not survive on the long term.
Dude, bugs and seeds are lightweight - way lighter than humans! We can transport enough seeds to comprise a viable breeding population of pretty much any plant you can name in a sack that weighs less than a single human. Bees are hardly big compared to, say, you. Add whatever technology comes along after CRISPR, and biodiversity won't really be the issue.
So, now we're positing that our putative colonists will have the ability to genetically manipulate entire species on a global scale every time a new blight shows up? Every new disease, blight, whatever will just get magically resolved by the power of genetic manipulation?
There are big questions around terraforming, but getting the plants and bugs isn't the hard part. The hard part is understanding medium and long term atmosphere and climate dynamics.
Well, yes, those are big problems too. But the fact that you have to manufacture arable soil for an entire planet is a HUGE issue. We're not talking about soil here. Mars has no biosphere at all. Every ton of soil you need to grow food will have to be manufactured, on site, using various species that will need to be brought from Earth, as well as means to control those species and keep them in balance, in the wild, without constant intervention from people.
Because if you don't do that, you're stuck living in domes forever.
