The one reason (and it may not be sufficient, but it is something Antarctica or any ocean arcology could address) that one should push to the moon and to mars.... they are steps to eventually getting enough humans off the planet and self sustaining in case our lovely green-blue marble gets a big extinction level event happen... 

Well, that pessimistic perspective aside, there are ~lots~ of cool, sci-fi environments on many worlds that don't require a spacecraft to reach.  I don't remember much of the rest of the film but that scene of the ~Enterprise~ rising out of the ocean in the second ~Trek~ reboot--a scene Lucas Trask mused about accomplishing with his ~Nemesis~ in H. Beam Piper's ~Space Viking~ half a century before--was pretty cool.

Imagine hunting some giant creature under a polar ice cap or mining precious minerals through the glaciers covering a polar continent. Imagine searching for archaeological remnants of a lost civilization that lived on a now-frozen polar continent during a time of global warming. Imagine refugees fleeing to a polar continent after a nuclear war had devastated the temperate zones of the world.

All of these are going to be more interesting adventure settings than yet another Moonbase Alpha. . . .

Cheers

David