Was the article by any chance something like this?
Mars One offers an out of this world experience | Travel Weekly
I'd be very surprised if a non-profit non-government group actually successfully colonized mars, but good luck to them. Since it's taking neither any of my effort nor any tax dollars, I'm all for it.
Generally speaking, I think colonizing Mars is an important step for the human race. This may be morbid but, I think sooner or later by human or natural action, all human life is going to be wiped out. Super-plagues, asteroids, nuclear holocaust... if all that's avoided then certainly when the sun turns into a red giant (I believe the time until then is measured in millions of years, maybe billions).
Of course, having people off of earth won't make anyone on earth any less dead, so in that sense it doesn't matter... but if you care about the human species continuing to exist (and there's a high chance that you do since caring about survival of the group is strongly selected for by evolutionary forces), well, if you care about that then you'll have to agree that we need off-planet settlements. Since Mars is the nearest planet that -could- be permanently colonized it'll be good practice. Of course, sooner or later we need to colonize other stars, but that's not a problem for this generation (well, not for this generation unless a cure for aging is found soon).
Mars -is- a dead rock, but it doesn't have to stay that way. We have the technology to bring it to life (actually, you hardly need technology, life is pretty darned good at self-propogating, just bring some samples of arctic ice and see what single-celled organisms survive and you'll have oxygen in your atmosphere in no time. Probably not enough to support -human- life, but it'll be earth-like life anyway, and make it easier to harvest oxygen.) If you don't want to do planetary engineering, we also have the technology to create a self-sustaining solar-powered population inside a dome. Of course, the expense is extraordinary to do so.
