While it's true the Gobi desert has been sparsely populated for ages, saying that a mine is a colony is like saying an offshore oil platform is a colony.
A self-sustaining Mars colony needs enough people that there is spare capacity to raise children and educate them to the point that they can maintain the systems themselves. That's going to be, what, 100K+ people? 1M+ people? 10M+?
A self-sustaining Mars colony needs enough people that there is spare capacity to raise children and educate them to the point that they can maintain the systems themselves. That's going to be, what, 100K+ people? 1M+ people? 10M+?
The entire Ömnögovi Province has 66K people.
That Wikipedia article links to https://web.archive.org/web/20140724131423/http://www.circle... from a decade ago which points out how the mine is taking water that was supplying the animals local herders used.
If that's still the case, and usable surface water is disappearing, that sounds like the opposite of a self-sustaining colony.