- a submarine
- the middle of Death Valley
- the middle of Antarctica
- the (completely lifeless) top of mount Fuji
Living in a Mars colony would be a combination of all these experiences.
If you somehow have the magic sauce to make Mars enjoyable, you could offer this experience in the middle of the desert as well. You could tackle real habitation problems on this planet.
Just building a couple school buses (ISS) to float around the Earth took hundreds of billions.
And to the "what about nuclear war on Earth" argument: are you going to build a lightbulb factory on Mars? Semiconductor fab? Smelter? No Mars colony would be self sufficient for a realllllly long time
EDIT: Earth 2 Earth is interesting, though I don't know how you solve the vomit problem. Or the "sometimes the rockets explode " problem.