re: #5 Achilles Tang

That I don’t agree with. We can only do so much with robots, and we need longer term and bigger goals than analyzing rocks, like expanding off earth.

Each generation of robots is smarter and more versatile than the previous generation, and colonizing a cold dead rock is, in near term, a sci-fi fantasy. Realistically, its going to be a very long time before we exhaust the potential of robotic explorers and have a real need to send humans to Mars, as thrilling as it would be. And I don’t think the thrill justifies the expense and the risk.