You are pretty set against the idea of landing on another planet huh? You don't think it is worthy of a look huh? Not even as a place to experiment? Research and procedures to see if it is possible to sustain a population on a rock other than our own? Pretty damning of science if you ask me.
I say, "letter rip tater chip." If they wanna blast off to another planet...go get em. Maybe while they are at it...they can check under the ice of Europa. It isn't just about "colonizing." It is about exploration. Giving us a landing pad to jump to other places. It would certainly open up a variety of scientific opportunities just having a manned base on mars. For that matter just having an unmanned base would be pretty damn impressive.
Idk. I won't condemn this as a futile naive effort just because it is a dream. If we all thought that way we wouldn't even be having this discussion. There would be no satellites, moon landings, or the Internet
Why not a quest for heaven? It's been written about for eons and is supposed to be a marvelous place.
Jump to "other places." What other places? We can LOOK for other places at 186,000 miles per second - and in all directions. We can travel seeking other places in only 1 direction at 7 miles per second. So that's YOUR plan. To put people in a space ship and send them out looking at 7 miles per second for which the nearest known planet outside our solar system - totally uninhabitable in every way - is over 100,000 years away.
Yeah, that's a rational plan. But, hey, here's another idea. HOW ABOUT FIGURING OUT WHICH DIRECTION TO GO BEFORE HEADING OUT ON A JOURNEY THAT 10,000 generations have live and die in a box before even seeing a planet that is a maybe. And doing that search looking over all our galaxy in all directions, rather than picking one of a billion possible directions for your 10,000 generation price lottery ticket.
10,000 generations for a 1 in 1,000,000,000 long shot.
And if that gamble pays off, it'd only take another 10,000 generations of space travelers for the next travels to it. So, if that 100,000 trillion to 1 odds gamble paid off, in about 500 million years it could possibly benefit people on earth. And dozens to hundreds of years each way for just a communication.
And having Mars rather than the Moon as a "jumping off point" would be like backing your car 1/100,000 of an inch backwards to get a closer starting point for a 2000 mile road trip. And walking for 12 months to carry each suitcase to it. 6 months to take it to the car and 6 months to come back for the next one.
The best "jumping off place" is, of course, earth.
These "plans" are without any comprehension of the distances involved in space and objects that are light-years apart.
:lamo
Name ONE "scientific opportunity" on Mars that isn't on the moon? Or in orbit around earth?