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[Name removed]

[bluedigger]

1. Make Mars Earth Again!

[drray23]

2. thats money well invested

To put it in perspective it is about one third of a percent of the pentagon budget..

[forest444]

10. And just 1.3% of the $1.5 TRILLION blown on the F-35 boondoggle.

But, hey - one man's boondoggle is another man's cash cow.

[longship]

3. Getting humans to Mars and back is really, really tough.

At this point we have not solved half the big issues, no matter what Robert Zubrin says (and I like him).

We do not have a rocket.

We do not have a spacecraft. And no, the new one by Boeing is not big enough by itself. (It is necessary, but not sufficient.)

We have no way yet to safely land humans there, let alone get them off the surface.

We have no way yet to protect the travelers in transit, let alone on Mars, both places where radiation is very hazardous.

Humans to Mars and back will be a two year mission, minimum. Just supplying the mission would push things well beyond anything we've done before. Just how do you make food last years?

All these components, and more, need to be well tested first.

And $2 Billion won't even begin to fund it.

I agree that we need to go. We also need to keep funding planetary science. Maybe we could do both if we stopped fighting wars for some time.

My best to you.

[kestrel91316]

4. Awesome. Beats spending trillions to send humans to Mars so they can die of radiation or

wind up crippled and marooned due to osteoporosis and muscle wasting.

[IamTheNoodle]

5. Cheaper than 3 B-2 bombers.

They cost between $725 - $900 million each. Take me to Mars.

[DavidDvorkin]

6. Worth every penny.

[hunter]

7. Human missions to Mars are bullshit.

Long duration space travel is much more dangerous and difficult than, for example, the International Space Station. The Martian natural environment is much harsher than that depicted in The Martian movie.

Humans of our sort will never have any significant presence in space beyond the moon. The most significant space exploration will be accomplished by our intellectual offspring; artificially intelligent robots or genetically modified organisms, perhaps a fusion of both.

I think transporting humans to Mars would be a tremendous waste of resources.

If humans ever do end up living in space for any significant amount of time then it will be as guests of our intellectual offspring, offspring who can work naked, no space suits required, in unearthly environments such as the Moon, Mars, or any other place beyond earth orbit.

That's my optimistic prediction. It's far more likely climate change, rising oceans, and population pressures will end the world civilization a small percentage of us now enjoy.

I'm very enthusiastic about unmanned space exploration and don't want to waste whatever money we have on manned space flight beyond near-earth orbit.

My grandfather was an engineer for the Apollo project. Creating bits of metal that carried men to the moon and back was his proudest professional achievement. He'd always talk about that, he never talked about his career as an Army Air Force officer during World War II.

Nevertheless I think the Apollo project was, in large part, grandstanding.

The unmanned Mariner 4 mission to Mars, flying past the planet July 14-15, 1965, pretty much killed any science fiction dreams of human semi-habitability on any nearby planet.

[denbot]

11. Every journey starts with the first step.

Our species survival depends on us getting off our little rock while it's still habitable.

In a way we are simply retracing the first steps our earliest ancestors took, by wondering far afield from the safety of the tree lines.

No less parlous, no less necessary for our species further development.

[hunter]

14. We're not that special.

This old Earth has seen many innovative species come and go. It's not always the most intelligent species who survive.

The complexity of maintaining humans in space is simply too high; if it wasn't impossible then species similar to our own would be all over the galaxy in a highly annoying and obvious manner.

Nope, Star Trek isn't going to happen. This universe is extremely hostile to the interstellar expansion of species such our own, no matter how determined they are to leave the nest. Humans are very fragile beings.

In my personal cosmology everything is moving at the speed of light, you, me, and light itself. We're all just interference patterns written briefly upon the light. There is no "faster than light," there is no "slower than light." It's all light. If there are space-aliens among us, they are thus far invisible to us. They might be particles of dust, they might be dark matter. Clearly, they don't consider us worthy of any kind of communication.

Should any of our intellectual offspring (engineered biological or mechanical representations of humans) succeed in space they will be nothing like us. They won't need air, they will thrive at temperatures that would kill any natural human, and they won't be bothered by levels of solar and cosmic radiation that severely damage natural humans. (The International Space Station is largely protected by earth's magnetic field, and trips to the moon were brief. In both cases large solar storms shedding highly energetic particles and radiation in earth's direction would severely damage our present day "first step" space travelers.)

Our best bet as humans is to preserve what's left of earth's natural environment while maintaining a high level of scientifically inquisitive civilization. That might give us time to create self-reproducing beings with human thought patterns capable of jogging naked on Mars or Pluto, or going outside without a space suit to fix something on a spaceship.

There's a story by Poul Anderson, Call me Joe, ahead of its time in some ways, behind in others, about artificial biological beings with human minds specifically created to live on the surface of Jupiter. To thrive in space we'll need to create some Joes.

I think the optimistic, most likely future of space exploration will be increasingly autonomous robots. At some point they become intelligent, and at some later point they reproduce themselves. Maybe then they'll remember us fondly as the species that created them and take a few of us along for the ride.

Whatever happens, the future does not belong to humanity. 100,000 years from now our civilization is little more than a curious layer of trash in earth's geologic record and a few bits of metal in space.

[jtunes]

8. why are we spending so much to send dogs to Mars?

when we should be taking care of dogs on Earth, FIRST!!

[ffr]

9. Disagree with OP, this is far better than human exploration

$2.1B is a drop in the bucket compared to what it would cost to send humans. And for what? So we can say we did it? Not to mention the health side effects of sending humans and trying to return them and all that weight. Complicated. Dangerous and wasteful for very little reward.

NASA knows best. Send rovers that can explore for years or decades, rather than humans and all of their expiration date life support.

[n2doc]

12. Far cheaper to send unmanned missions

The OP betrays a lack of understanding of space flight and the risks involved. The Martian was a movie, not reality. The estimate for a manned mission is 100 billion, and that is probably an underestimate.

[LanternWaste]

13. I don't think that mere disagreement with your premise indicates one believes a movie

I don't think that mere disagreement with your premise indicates one believes a movie to be anything but a movie.

However, if there is data which may be observed, measured and tested to support your conclusion, I'd be more than willing to read it; else that particular of your response seems at best, petulant....