- Yes, but I’ll be really old.
Lamentably, YES, I think it’s very likely to happen within the next 50-60 years. What a waste!
Don’t you remember the film of The Martian Chronicles that showed the lander in a Mars guy’s back yard, facing away from the house? :rolleyes:
OP: No, nobody has balls like JFK, Neil Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. I’m 52.
In my short time on Earth, I’ve learned that it’s futile to predict such things.
Everything points to yes, until an unseasonal hurricane comes along and wipes out the entire launch and research complex.
Or, everything points to no until a radical breakthrough in physics allows for extremely efficient, speedy, safe interplanetary transportation.
Why speculate?
I’m going to go with a definite, probably…
How much of the budget goes to NASA?
I don’t know, and don’t particularly care. The tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars and millions of super-qualified man-hours it would take to get a man on Mars could be better spent on almost anything else they might plausibly be spent on. We’re not going to learn anything from a manned mission that we couldn’t learn **much **cheaper without the “manned” part. To me it would just be a neat trick.
If you feel differently I completely respect that. To most people I’m sure it would be, emotionally, something quite a bit more than a neat trick, and there’s value in that. Personally, I just can’t get past the galling inefficiency of it.
I’m with ralph. Especially considering that by the time we could send people, robots will be so much more advanced. Look how far Spirit and Opportunity have gone, and imagine the models they could launch in 50 years. They won’t be as good as people, but the gap grows a lot thinner. There’s a finite list of things they’ll need to be able to accomplish, they’re relatively expendable, and far less complicated to maintain than people.
I’m 31, and I don’t consider it likely. It wouldn’t surprise me too much though. If it happens, I’d give even odds that it is some country/party other than the USA. Also, we’ll probably kill a bunch of time on the moon first. With the frequency space missions seem to progress, that could blow a decade right there. The ISS is a 13+ year project, for example.
Wish I could say yes, because I’m all in favor of it. But I’m 63, and don’t think I’ll live that long.
0.6%
Very probably no, unless I live to a very ripe age.
Age : 43, 36 years to go (*)
(*)according to life expectancy tables
I’m 46. No, it won’t happen in the next, say 30 years. It’ll take about a year to get to Mars, and obviously about a year to return home. Add that to the amount of time spent on the planet and the food logistics alone are incomprehensible. How do you store 3 years worth of food and water on a small spacecraft? The thought is that we’d need to actually grow food on Mars and get water from the planet too. No way that’s going to happen in 30 years.
If something akin to a warp drive is invented and if a replicator is invented and if James T. Kirk is alive and kicking then we’ll go.
Until then we’re stuck here, on this ball of mud
As I have no intention of ever dying, then I say:
YES.
[SUB]Seriously, who thought up this “aging” business? And death? Don’t get me started on death. Mortality is overrated, in my mind, and I refuse to take part in it.[/SUB]
YES. I am 30.
Which is a huge chunk of cheddar. According to their website, NASA’s 2009 budget request is $17,614,200,000.00
I’m 42.
I think the technology will be available in my lifetime (say the next 30-40 years), but I don’t know that the political or economic variables will be there. I’ll go out on a limb and say that humans will attempt it sometime before the outside edges of my life expectancy, but I don’t think it will necessarily be the US that does it. I would actually put even odds on China doing it first.
If we make a huge leap in computer intelligence, then we won’t have to send a man or woman to Mars. Although it’d be a nice place to visit, it’ll be out of our means to live there for a really long time. I expect computer intelligence to advance much more over the next 20 years, than our space travel and life support tech.
I’m guessing much more advanced robots will be planting the flag, then coming back with souvenirs.
Within 100 to 200 years, we might bother ourselves.
Now the Moon is a whole ‘nuther ball o’ wax… I’m firing up the popcorn…
I’m 40 and don’t expect a manned Mars mission in my lifetime. I expect that Man will set foot again on the Moon in my lifetime though, China probably as a demonstration of something or other.
I’m gonna say, an Asian consortium; it’s too expensive for one nation to bear alone. China is huge, and will be hugely wealthy, but this project is still an enormous burden. But China, plus India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia maybe… that starts to get more realistic.