There aren’t even any canals.
I think your point boils down to: a manned mission would do more because we’d spend more money on it. Which may be a valid point - we would justify spending more on a manned project because it would have other benefits besides science, i.e. public outreach & education, popular support by taxpayers, national pride, etc.
If instead you compare, for example, a $100-billion manned Mars program to a $100-billion unmanned Mars program, there’s no doubt that the unmanned program would do more science. The launch vehicles would be cheaper (because man-rated rockets are inherently more expensive), so we can afford to launch more. The spacecraft can be slower, because there are no astronauts getting exposed to radiation and consuming supplies. The unmanned program doesn’t need to transport any food, air, oxygen (or equipment to manufacture those on Mars), habitat, life support equipment, medical equipment, etc. The unmanned program can have a fleet of surface vehicles, and they will continue to operate for years and years. Eventually those vehicles can bring the collected samples to unmanned laboratories and sample-return rockets. There can be high-bandwidth relay stations, so scientists on Earth can use telepresence technology to make decisions about where to explore and which samples to send back to earth.
Exactly. “Unmanned” just means “no people actually standing around in a vacuum soaking up radiation”. Humans are still very much involved, operating the equipment and making decisions remotely. Yes, there’s a time lag, so they have to plan things out, but it’s still human decision making.
Sheesh. How did we ever develop nuclear energy if you actually need to have a “man” doing everything? Inside nuclear reactors and fuel enrichment plants and inside particle accelerators, the environment is far too dangerous for human beings to be there.
Not true.
About the only thing you can say so far with the probes we have sent is that any possible fossils are not large AND common AND obviously fossils WHERE the probes have looked so far.
Its a data point for sure, but its a big planet so I don’t think that is saying much.
The odds are overwhelmingly, enormously, stupendously likely that there isn’t any trace of life.
Even if there were, it doesn’t do shit for the people who are alive right now back on earth paying for it.
Its always refreshing when someone has the as yet unknown figured out already. Sure saves everyone else the hassle and costs.
When the Earth is destroyed by a planet-killer asteroid, we’ll see how independent Mars can be. It’ll be an interesting experiment. 
Some people need to load up the Realism Overhaul suite of mods in Kerbal Space Program and try some of these wonderful ideas out to realize how completely impractical some of them are. Like how the heck we’d get enough water ice into orbit to form shielding for an interplanetary mission. Every kilo of payload is precious, which is why manned missions are horribly extravagant. Astronauts need huge masses of life support, all of which can be scientific payload in a robotic mission.
I’m not necessarily saying we shouldn’t send people to Mars, but just that it will never be the cost-effective way of doing planetary science.
I know you say this in jest, but I always see this argument and have to ask - is Mars (or any other location in the solar system) at any less risk to being obliterated by an asteroid? I mean, this angst about Earth getting hit as a motivation for colonizing some other patch of planet - it seems all locations within reach have the same risk, and most space projects boil down to “it’s cool and sexy and techy and more fun than solving our Earth-bound problems”.
If we are going to go space exploring, we need to find another reason than colonizing Mars.
Any two outposts of the species have better survival odds than either one. We should colonize other worlds, at whatever rate and scale is practicable, to affirm our manifest destiny in the galaxy. Because the alternative is to die out here.
Yes, either one MIGHT be obliterated by an asteroid. But the chances of *both *of them being struck by asteroids is remote. And if we have a Europa colony as well, it’s even less likely.
The human race needs a backup in case of catastrophic failure.
Good grief, this is just ridiculous. The odds are NOT ‘overwhelmingly, enormously, stupendously likely that there isn’t any trace of life’…in fact, more and more they are finding out that in fact Mars had a much more life friendly environment in the past than we previously though. In addition, there is even the chance that the briny pools they THINK might be just below the surface could have life still. Your assertion is just that…YOUR assertion. And then you go on to say that even if we found traces of life in the past or even living today it would be no big deal. You are obviously opposed to ANY scientific study of Mars, whether it be robotic or human and you make sweeping statements that you pull out of your ass and aren’t backed by anything. :smack:
Like I said, this is a debate, not a answerable question, but your assertions in GQ are really ridiculous.
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I think your point boils down to: a manned mission would do more because we’d spend more money on it. Which may be a valid point - we would justify spending more on a manned project because it would have other benefits besides science, i.e. public outreach & education, popular support by taxpayers, national pride, etc.
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Sure…manned missions would cost more and we’d get more out of them in a shorter period of time. It’s all about tradeoffs. But it’s also all about reality…we aren’t going to send regular probes to Mars for a century or so, spending just a billion here and a billion there. We aren’t going to build fancy expensive probes to do all the wonderful things we COULD do either. We are going to send occasional probes as we’ve been doing to (hopefully, if they make it) do some very slow but useful science over long periods of time in relatively small areas of Mars and hope that there is something interesting there AND that we don’t miss it.
That might be all we ever do. But IF we did a manned mission we’d get a lot more out of it in a shorter period of time, which, to me is a ‘reason to send a manned mission to Mars’. There are others as well that you touched on besides science that would be a benefit to the country or countries that do it, but strictly from a scientific perspective there are a lot of benefits we would get out of a manned mission that we’d either have to wait a LONG time for with robotic probes or may never get at all.
Well, even then I’d disagree but I concede that it’s debatable, but the thing is you aren’t going to GET the same level of funding, ever, for unmanned missions as you would for a manned mission. So, realistically, you compare what you will realistically get with unmanned missions (such as the ones actually being done by the various nations out there) compared to what you would get with a real manned mission. COULD we do an unmanned mission that would get us everything a manned mission would? Maybe…and it would probably cost comparable amounts of money if you built in all of the redundancy and the samples return and everything else that would allow robots to be as flexible as humans in exploration. But then it sort of blows out the one real advantage of robotic missions, which is that even if they are more limited in what they can get us they are cheap and you don’t have to jump through the same levels of hoops to get the funding (in the US anyway).
Isn’t this a bit like saying “we have no proof God doesn’t exist, so we should continue believing in Him.”
We’ve been sending flyby probes, landers and rovers there for 50 years and have zero evidence of life.
Getting humans to Mars is half the battle; returning them to Earth is the other half. Plus, the enormity of supplies to sustain human life for something like three years is ridiculously huge.
I don’t see humans ever going to Mars: ever.
OK. I still don’t think we should be bothering with colonizing other planets, but I accept this position as valid.
Indeed. I sometimes see this divergent philosophy when it comes to space exploration.
Upthread I mention driverless cars - it seems some who argue that driverless cars will drive us around hardly ever making a mistake, but we still need to send a man to Mars. Some who argue that there is no God, but there MUST be life out there and we have not found it yet (in spite of no evidence for either, both are relying on faith).
I am just curious as to why when it comes to space exploration there is this divergence? There may be good reasons for going to space, but IMHO sending men to search for life on Mars because it’s our destiny does not seem like a good investment in terms of resolving some of our more pressing Earthbound issues.
Of course it has the same odds, but what are the odds both Earth and Mars get wiped out at the same time? It’s the space-adapted adage of “don’t put your eggs in one basket.”
And if we as a species want to gain some more control over a long-term future, like maybe centuries or millennia, it’s completely logical to plant a few colonies as early as possible.
The thing is though that statistically speaking it’s very unlikely that there ISN’T life out there somewhere. But it’s not on Mars and distances to other stars is too prohibitive. Sure, we might invent a warp drive and figure out how to explore other solar systems, but most likely we won’t since the speed of light cannot be surpassed as we know it. I think eventually some other country like China or India will send people to the Moon, and I also think that may be the extent of our manned space exploration.
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Isn’t this a bit like saying “we have no proof God doesn’t exist, so we should continue believing in Him.”
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Um, no…it isn’t like that at all. We have evidence that water used to flow on Mars. That alone is more evidence for life than ANYTHING we have for God, and that’s not the extent of the circumstantial evidence for life.
Yeah, in the 50 or so kilometers of Mars we’ve ACTUALLY managed to sort of explore we haven’t found it yet so we should definitely give up because nothing to see there. We haven’t yet seen even a meter under the soil, we haven’t explored any of the large number of cave systems, and we haven’t explored even 99.999% of the planet on the ground, yet you are willing to simply state categorically that there is now nor ever was life on Mars??
Certainly, though I don’t think it’s ‘ridiculously huge’, especially with the ability to somewhat live off the land and to send multiple unmanned preparation ships there prior to the first human landing. But it will certainly be a large and expensive undertaking, no doubt about that, and there will certainly be risks as well. But it’s within our ability to do technically and from and engineering perspective…it’s the will and funding that are lacking, not the ability.
And I think you are mistaken, but I guess we shall see. I believe that humans will land on Mars in my lifetime, and I’m fairly old. If I die before it happens then you win. 
So? All of us will die, no matter what.
I honestly believe we should spend more money in underwater research rather than spending it on space exploration. Or at least balance it. I can 100% guarantee that the next type of ‘fuel’ is hiding in the waters below. It’s probably going to be magnetic or something. Just my hunch.