“Me and mine think Margaret Thatcher was terrific for the UK, but I didn’t plan out the rest of this sentence.”
Interesting that in 2013 the trend has done a complete 180 to perceived attitudes in the '50s; perceived social barriers to the presidency have come crumbling down but confidence in technology has come down? Thanks for the replies so far.
There’s a significant sense in which advances in technology have made a manned Mars mission less likely. It has to do with the considerable - and increasing - success of robotic missions. We’ve easily reached the stage where cost/benefit analysis strongly discourages manned missions.
I’d say at this point asking if we’ll see an openly gay president before people on Mars might be less of a sure thing.
I agree with this - virtually every reason to visit Mars is better served by robots than by man. In the past the argument was that man would better spot what rocks are interesting to study. The past several rovers have accomplished this goal by allowing researchers on Earth to select the rocks which the rover than studies. Man is supposed to be better at making split second decisions to save a mission, but recent advances in self driving cars and drone technology demonstrates that man is no longer crucial to the success of exploration - we can safely direct from a distance.
The only reason I could see us going to Mars is for symbolic and political reasons. In the 60’s the Space Program pumped much money into universities and private industry for research. While that research was technically for the space program the results went in to many other applications - most visibly to us the research that went into computer development.
It’s not a question of a decrease in technology, but rather an acceptance that technology is very capable for the job. At some point man will go back into space but I suspect that person will be modified in some way based on genetic engineering or some other technology to make them more adaptable to the space environment. Until then, man is just in the way.
For rather astounding values of ‘easily.’
Woman president, because (a) getting to Mars is really quite hard, starting with the fact that even at its closest, it’s 200 times further away than the Moon, and (b) we might well elect a woman President in 3 years.
What Xema and Frazzled said. Curiosity’s doing a great job on Mars, and doesn’t require air, food, heat, or protection from cosmic radiation.
The hard part about manned space travel is the matter of keeping us fragile creatures alive, and the vast quantity of mass it adds to a mission in order to be able to do so. (All of which needs to be lifted out of Earth’s gravity well and accelerated in the proper direction, which adds another vast quantity of mass to the operation in the form of fuel, which…) That’s the downside of manned space travel. The upside is that a human can make some decisions on the spot that maybe a machine can’t.
And the better our technology gets, the more trivial that upside gets, but the downside never goes away.
Perhaps the presidential requirements in the poll need to be changed to make it less likely. We could try for the trifecta, “an openly gay, openly atheist woman elected President.” Even less likely, “an openly gay, openly atheist woman representing the Republican Party elected President.” 
What about “Catholic Church allowing women as priests” or “travel to Mars and back?”
Mars is way too costly. Technically it’s probably quite feasible but the truth is no nation can afford to do it. It MIGHT happen as a multi-national effort but still there is no earthly reason to go there, robots are much better for space exploration.
Madam President is about 38 months away as the Presidents Clinton move back in the White House.
I don’t think Hillary will be elected President, but I do think we’ll have a female president long before we put a man on Mars.
In fact, I’m not optimistic that we’ll put a man on Mars, or even go back to the Moon, in the 21st century.
The way the current Pope is going, I’m not sure I’d place any money on women never becoming priests. The guy is physically dragging the Church leftwards ideologically as fast as he can.
We’ve sent robots to Mars, and probably could send a human there. But isn’t the real problem going to be getting him home again? Are there feasible designs, even in theory, for craft that can take off from Mars without a launchpad and booster rocket?
Sure - we had a spacecraft lift off from the Moon without either of those things.
It would be more difficult to lift off from Mars, since Mars’ surface gravity is slightly more than twice that of the Moon, and if there was a Mars mission, we’d probably do the same sort of lunar module - landing module split that we did with the Moon landings, in order to minimize the mass that had to be lifted off the Moon’s/Mars’ surface.
But in the long list of hurdles to a successful Mars-and-back mission, I’d bet this one isn’t even in the top 20.
But I could see Elon Musk, 35-40 years from now, deciding that a one-way trip to Mars would be the perfect way to have one last great adventure.
I believe we’ll have a female president before we have a successful manned mission to Mars for several reasons. First, I think we’re at a point in history where gender isn’t enough to hold a quality candidate out of the office. Looking at 2008, without regard to how good or bad of a president she may have made, in all likelihood, if she had gotten the nomination rather than Obama, she would have won. There may have been some sexist motivation behind some objections, but she was taken seriously. Similarly, though she was only a VP candidate, the same year Palin was on the ballot. She was rejected fairly strongly, but it seemed clear to me that the rejection had very little to do with her gender and much more to do with her views, experience, and to some extent, her personality.
Second, there’s no government or private enterprise of which I’m aware putting any measurable effort into a manned mission to Mars. Even if a capabale nation began putting resources into it, we’re still probably a decade or so away, at best. But considering the current state of the world economy, and the lack of political will, given that one of the primary motivations for the moon mission was the Cold War, we’re probably looking much longer than that. So considering that it’s not terribly unlikely that Hillary Clinton could get elected, and that there’s several other potential women that could run as soon as 2016, and likely several more in the next few elections, that seems a safer bet. That is, I think it’s more likely that a quality female candidate will run than that a nation or private enterprise will have the will and resources to take on a manned Mars mission.
Third, even if Mars was possible to do tomorrow, I don’t want it to happen any time soon, certainly not in any time frame before we should have had ample opportunities to elect a woman. In general, there’s very little to gain from a manned mission, as technology has progressed far enough that a human being there gains little or nothing, certainly not enough to be worth the huge extra cost and risk associated with getting them there. Further, I’d like to see us fixing more of our domestic and international issues before we really focus on that sort of venture. I don’t necessarily expect a woman to be elected before we do that, but I’d like to see women taken seriously such that, should she lose, she loses on her character, qualifications, and positions rather than her gender.
So, that all said, even though I don’t expect Hillary Clinton to be elected in 2016, I do expect we’ll see plenty of women run and be taken seriously in the next few decades, such that the chance of one winning is fairly good.