If there is no coming back, why go to Mars?

They probably have nothing left to lose, such as friends or family.
Either that or they care more about going to Mars more than they care about anyone or anything else. Some people are fascinated by outer space and want to know the most they can know about it.

Because SCIENCE!

But seriously…first, you go down in history, and that’s a form of immortality. Second, there’s no GUARANTEE that you’ll come back…but people will always have hope that they’ll be merely the first…and eventually they’ll have the opportunity to come back.

I suppose, but how about the living conditions? It doesn’t sound like it could be too much fun.

It’s a grand adventure, like leaving England for Jamestown 400 years ago.

Space… the final frontier… and no AR-15s.

It is the American Pioneer Spirit!

and the supply of midget hookers with three boobs

TO BE STRAIGHT UP AWESOME

To see something that no human has ever seen? To step foot on a surface that has never known man? To see a tiny slice of the cosmos, to advance the possibility of space travel and colonization? Who wouldn’t?

At my age, I’d go so long as I knew my wife, children and grandchildren will be taken care of by way of thanks. I’d give survival my best MacGyver effort and hope that maybe rocket scientists will figure out how to come get me before I give up the ghost. But I would dearly love to be right there to do the research that eludes our current robots like Rover; and to bring a writer’s touch to sharing all I see with my fellow humans back on Earth.

Because Mars is there. And because at some point it can be done.

Space travel is an obscene waste of money that could be put to better use and it makes me very angry. I cannot fathom why any space projects are even considered when children and adults are sleeping on the streets or starving to death, or worse.
Humans are insane. The tens of thousands who sign up for Mars are living in ‘la la’ land and shouldn’t encourage the Space Authorities.
We should only go to Mars when we are worthy of it.

@WMFlight Investment in research for space exploration brought you much of the technology you use to live your day to day life today and has paid back its initial investment thousands of times over. There is also the inconvenient fact Earth will, at some point, face an existential threat we cannot avoid if we’re anchored here on this planet. If we do not learn how to move on, our species is doomed to extinction. This isn’t a guess, it is a scientific certainty.

Because I’m from there. My wife is from Venus.

Who’s to say that there isn’t?

@WMFlight What if we can tunnel out Mars? Grow food there, house people there? Start a colony there? Expand? That would be reason enough for me!
Fact is, Earth isn’t getting any bigger, and we as a species are growing almost exponentially.

@ETpro ” ...space exploration brought you much of the technology you use to live your day to day life today and has paid back its initial investment thousands of times over.”
People used to invent things before NASA though, who is to say those things couldn’t have been invented right here on earth?

@flo Some things probably could have. But people don’t invent for the sake of inventing; there needs to be a need for it. Space travel has a lot of need built in. And then, once a thing is made, other clever people find other uses for it.
Wiki has a list of NASA “spin-off technologies” that you might be interested in reading.

@flo Things don’t just magically get invented very often. Things get invented when we invest in inventing them. Private, for profit industry invests almost exclusively in inventing small incremental improvements to gain a marketing edge and often to just be able to boast of some new feature which is largely meaningless, but which will boost sales. Most of our great leap invention has come through public investment in basic research, something for profit industry rarely does.

@Nullo
@ETpro
They can invent a way of not having to go up there to do these researches.

@flo Inventing ways to stay here won’t invent a way to escape the absolute certainty that “here” will get destroyed, if not before, then definitely when our Sun runs low on fuel and turns into a red giant enveloping the Earth and melting us into its own core.

@ETpro what is the point in living for iternity this way for example?

… I mean eternity, before @gailcalled get me.

@flo ...gets me. She’s really after you now. ~

@dxs omg! I should slow down really, but she won’t, not anymore

@flo I haven’t said anything about eternal life, just survival of the species.

@ETpro Eternal life of individuals, and/or eternal life of the species, the point is the same.

@flo Let’s agree to disagree about that.

@flo It’s relatively easy to keep a robot alive in lousy environments – we do it all the time. You don’t have to feed a robot, or keep it around 20*-30* C for best results, or shield it from every stray bit of electromagnetism. But that won’t solve a population crisis, will it?

I am not worried about the end of the world – being of the Christian persuasion I believe that it’s been sorted out already – but some people, @ETpro among them, are not so relaxed about it. And with good cause – as a race, we’re in or near dangerous waters. We recently had a close pass with an asteroid, as we have before, as we will again – only maybe not so far next time. Or there might be a catastrophic war. Or a societal collapse. We will inevitably use Earth up, eventually, and don’t really feel like the odd case of domestic violence is enough to warrant us giving up on the rest of us.
If you could properly colonize other places around Sol, wiping out life on Earth is downgraded from an extinction event to merely a horrendous tragedy. Or if Terra ismerely wounded, wealthy extra-terrestrial colonies could help restore it.
Your homework: read everything by Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov.

@Nullo
”...and don’t really feel like the odd case of domestic violence is enough to warrant us giving up on the rest of us.”
So, “the odd case” is all there is when it comes to domestic violence?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Hitler

Re. “Your homework: read everything by Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov.”
http://reverent.org/einstein_or_hitler.html

@flo No, it’s you, missing the point. Deliberately, it seems.
I suggested those three authors because, in the course of their careers, they come up with some pretty sophisticated concepts and arguments pertaining to colonization.

All the great comments above, PLUS… thank goodness scientists and explorers and inventors and great thinkers and writers didn’t/don’t take that attitude; otherwise, we’d still be living in caves.

You’d have to ask the thousands of people for their own reasons. There are good answers from such people here. I can see it seeming appealing to some people as a great adventure and worth the investment/self-sacrifice.

@WMflight I think Mars exploration is a worthy thing to do, for research and science purposes. There are many other things people spend time/resources on which I would shut down before I would halt space research. We could easily provide for human needs without scrapping the space program. We need to stop thinking in economic fallacies and reinvent our banking, politics, industry, agriculture, land use and corporations to be intelligent, wise, ecologically sustainable, and humanitarian. Thinking of scrapping space programs “so money can be spent on better things” seems like a hugely out-of-proportion notion coming from flawed economic fallacies, to me.

As for notions of the need to colonize, let’s get some perspective on time scale and threats:

Mousterian stone tool Neanderthal culture: ~300,000 years ago
Anatomically modern humans: ~200,000 years ago
Behaviorally modern humans: ~50,000 years ago
Agriculture begins: ~10,000 years ago
Nation-states begin: ~6,000 years ago
Empires begin: ~3,000 years ago
Industry begins: ~300 years ago
Spaceflight and nuclear weapons: ~50 years ago
Man on moon, Soviet 20-second lander on Mars: ~45 years ago
Viking 1 & 2 landers on Mars: ~40 years ago
Curiosity Rover lands on Mars: ~3 years ago
Time until it may become obvious even to fools that we are screwed due to human-made climate change: 50–100 years.
Time until our sun runs out of hydrogen: 5,400,000,000 years from now.

@ETpro I don’t think the sun running out of hydrogen is our most pressing problem.

@Nullo Tunnel colonization? There’s “room” under the surface of Mars? So I assume you are thinking about using the tunnel room on Earth first, and on the Moon?

@mattbrowne Because it’s there and at some point can be done? Hopefully we outgrow that being reason enough to do anything. Some things are bad ideas.