Joe, I'm stumped. Are you talking about the same Mars as the rest of us? I find Mars fascinating- hardly the world you describe. Robots have shown Mars to be a dynamic, diverse world, with an ancient natural history just crying for human explorers to go and discover. And I think you've read far too much into the exo-planet stories. All seem pretty bleak from the mostly surmised conditions posited on some of them. Mars isn't earthlike in many respects, but it's a heck of a lot closer than any exoplanets in the current inventory, and infinitely more accessable. It will be centuries, literally, to thousands of years, before humans ever actually think of those planets as "places"- if we ever do. They will remain mere data until long after our culture has crumbled to dust. I think it likely that Mars will be terraformed long, long before any exo-planets are ever even imaged with resolution greater than a spectrographic smear. Mars and other solar-system bodies are right here, practically in our own back-yard. We would be derelict in our duty to our species if we didn't go there and explore them in person. It is our nature. Well, most of our natures. I also don't place much credence in the stance that robot explorers are better than humans. The reasons are numerous and go beyond just the risk argument- which is utter nonsense when you take into account that we send our best young people off to be killed in foreign lands by the thousands, right here on earth. I guarantee you that even with odds weighted against them, you'd have thousands of scientists and engineers lining-up to volunteer to crew a Mars mission. That is part of being an American. We love challenges. But the mere presence of a human crew is what ups the odds of success. We can repair, jury-rig, replace, engineer solutions right on the spot. A profound, total failure can occur, of course, but that can and does happes even with the robotic probes. Mars does not have a good success record with robot probes. I believe the historical failure rate is over 1/3 of all missions launched. I think manned missions stand a much better chance because of our ability to improvise and change plans. I could go on, but lunch is over and I have to get back to work. Viva Marte! On Jan 2, 2008 12:43 PM, Joe Bauman <bau@desnews.com> wrote:
Yes indeed, Happy New Year to all our friends!
My predictions about a crewed Mars expedition are:
1, it will happen pretty soon because we have discovered a cheap new transportation system;
OR
2, it will never happen because robots are proving Mars isn't that interesting.