Who Will Get To Live on Mars?

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Let's say the Mars Project is a raving success and we see this planet become earth like, as in oceans, land, oxygen atmosphere, moderate temperatures that can sustain life. Who will get to decide what lives on Mars and where? Will it become another Earth or some elite place where only certain people are allowed in based on certain character traits or beliefs? What about animal life on Mars? Will the only ones who make it there be the ones used to feed humans? Can a cock roach survive the journey to Mars thus spreading the species there? What about spores of mold or little bits of pollen hitching a ride aboard the space vessel?

There are a lot of implications.

Even while terraforming, who decides what plants or is it going to be a smorgasbord?

You're getting WAY ahead of yourself here.

Colonizing Mars is not the same thing as "terraforming" Mars (creating oceans and greenery).
Terraforming,if its EVER possible, is centuries down the road.

If the Mars Project succeeds it will be like Plymouth Colony-just a little outpost. More colonies may follow. But folks will have to live like the scientists in Antarctica live now- underground, or in those high tech insulated igloo-like things that they show pics of on the news that the Mars project is planning, or they will have to live in Gerard O'Neil type space colonies (city sized cylinders) off planet floating in stable La Grange points in space.

In the near term the question might be "who is FORCED to move to Mars?", and not who "Gets to go?". The first colonists to follow these Mars Project pioneers might be convicts forced to work in mines on Mars. Mars might be used the way the Brits used Georgia, and then Australia, or the Czars (and later the Soviets) used Siberia: as a dumping ground for convicts, and political prisoners.

Why would anyone dump convicts on Mars, when they can use Antarctic islands for much cheaper, or prison ships?

The people who will go are the people who (a) want to and (b) have enough funding, from themselves or others. There won't be any Ellis island for a while yet at least, and only then if everyone recognised their claim of sovereignty over the entire planet - which is very unlikely.

My gut feeling is that we would never be able to make it like Earth.

Well, maybe in a billion years. By then the Earth will be very inhospitable itself. If nothing else, the rotation will have slowed from approximately one revolution per day to one revolution per month.

Think about it. The core of Mars is no longer molten. It cannot build up a magnetic field to protect the inhabitants from harmful radiation. Furthermore, to build a new atmosphere would be a major undertaking. That atmosphere would pretty much have to be mined from some place else. And with the lighter gravity, it would be harder to keep that atmosphere.

With the distance from the sun, the amount of light would be correspondingly less. To have any chance, the amount of CO2 would need to be quite high to trap the heat.

Hmmmmm. Could this be what the "Let's All Panic About Global Warming"crowd wants? Export our excess atmospheric CO2 to Mars?

Wouldn't it be weird if there were some way to create this bridge to Mars so we could just put everyone on Mars and let earth air out for say, ten years, then bring them back while Mars is "airing out" and just keep shuffling them back and forth?

We really should be spending money, time and effort fixing up this planet instead of leaving to wreck another one. Like that'll ever happen.

I don't think the people who "get" to live on Mars or anywhere else in the space beyond Earth are going to be undeniably human past the next X decades, recognizably in X + 2. The concept of the cyborg has its genesis in space travel for a reason: baseline humans are ill-adapted to the various environments beyond our cradle. We are fish carrying bowls onto land, then complaining of the weight: Three or four design considerations get marginalized or thrown out the window when we send robots, and this would be similarly true for a brain-in-the-vat cyborg, or exactly true for an uploaded human mind if such a thing is possible, while adding the benefit of a local intelligence guiding mining equipment and exploring the numberless worlds without the relative tyranny of relativity. In the long run, those human-descended machine-beings who were inclined could cultivate life more suited to the environment in question with the wisdom and experience gleaned from a former terrestrial existence and biome, rather than copy-pasting earth life with all the grace of a toddler drawing a picture of a frog on your wall in green crayon, which is still awesome. It's just too inefficient to cling to the human form, which has been in flux since before we had words for flux or human.

No one for very long. Just the trip there is being exposed to cosmic radiation for a year. life on the surface without a magnetic field is life in the microwave. I would expect rapid aging.

Mars has a smaller chemical base than Earth. Local production of anything would be a lot harder. lack of gravity and sunlight, life is not going to do well.

A Moon bare is just as bad.

A real Space Station is possible.