I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot, having most people die in the process, not knowing if they was an end to that sand, felt the same.
Why would you do that?
Two centuries in the future, the benefit of going to mars will be obvious, because we will have progressed and gain things we don't know about now.
That's how humanity works. We try crazy stuff. And a lot of it is stupid, expensive and dangerous. Plus the result is disappointing.
But eventually something pays of big time.
And everybody says of course we should have done it retrospectively.
It's like people asking why we are still making purely theoretical math research. Surely it's no use, and it's expensive.
I have no doubt many people opposed to the moon landing as well on those grounds.
I expect fully the comments to answer "but this time it's not the same because...". But it's never the same.
It's always a different situation. That's the point.
Moving to Mars is the opposite: it is crossing the desert to go move into a frozen hellscape of radioactive desert.
> I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot
Actually, this kind of thing basically never happened, for some values of never.
Humans didn't leave Africa by crossing the Sahara desert. When we left Africa, the Sahara wasn't a desert.
Similarly, Aboriginal Australians didn't swim or canoe to the mainland, they walked there at a time when sea levels were lower and there was a land bridge to PNG.
Until very recently, nobody did crazy long crossings over uninhabitable lands or waters. Expansion happened incrementally, over habitable areas to other habitable areas.
> But eventually something pays of big time.
There is no reason to think that there is anything of value on Mars. No oil, no arable land, no liquid water, no unique unobtanium like in the movies. Just the same eighty or so elements, in roughly the same distribution. Just colder, drier, and impossibly far from everything you care about.
Sometimes being outside easy nuclear strike capabilities of the superpowers is a good on its own. Plus lot less annoying environmentalists and I imagine plentiful fissile material.
If literally every nuclear bomb ever made was detonated in a world war, the fallout from that would be a significantly smaller problem than the steady-state radiation is on Mars right now.
The fallout will eventually decay, but Mars will stay an irradiated hellscape forever.
With a couple fairly simple genetic modifications humans could thrive in place with high background radiation, in a place where nobody can throw nukes at you for doing simple genetic modifications.
People didn't know there was a fertile land of the other side. Just like we don't know if there is a good thing that will come out of mars. We just know the constraints.
It's not about what you know is there. It's the potential.
There is no point for Usain Bolt to run that fast. There is not point in building the tallest tower in the world once again.
Meanwhile, the mars goal already managed to bring us spaceships that land and divide the cost of putting satellites in orbit by 10.
No other path lead to it because there was nothing to motivate it enough.
This comment is really poorly reasoned imo. To continue your metaphor, ancient peoples did not sail across the Pacific *, they sailed to the next nearest island and started colonies there (if viable). You could apply your logic to argue for colonising Uranus, or even the Sun.
> Two centuries in the future, the benefit of going to mars will be obvious
IF the colonisation of Mars is successful (however you define that), the benefits of it MIGHT be obvious. Those are 2 huge conditionals; it may not be possible to colonise Mars, and if it is possible, we may still not be seeing any benefits in 200 years time.
*Of course, some did, but very much by exception. And it rarely ended well for these people, or their tribes, or humanity at large.
Why would you do that?
Two centuries in the future, the benefit of going to mars will be obvious, because we will have progressed and gain things we don't know about now.
That's how humanity works. We try crazy stuff. And a lot of it is stupid, expensive and dangerous. Plus the result is disappointing.
But eventually something pays of big time.
And everybody says of course we should have done it retrospectively.
It's like people asking why we are still making purely theoretical math research. Surely it's no use, and it's expensive.
I have no doubt many people opposed to the moon landing as well on those grounds.
I expect fully the comments to answer "but this time it's not the same because...". But it's never the same.
It's always a different situation. That's the point.
That's what discovery is about.