>Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. Not for the people a

>Trying to go to Mars is equivalent to the explorers in the 1500-1700s discovering other continents. History has shown it was a good idea. Not for the people already living on those continents it wasn't. For them, it was a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. >We won't know the benefit of going to Mars until 100s of years after we do it. This is speculation, and if you're implying that explorers to the Americas didn't foresee the benefits, you're completely and factually wrong. They might not have predicted, for instance, the discovery of cocoa/chocolate, but they did think there was gold there (and there was; the Spanish brought back huge quantities of it), plus many other resources like furs, plus the ability to grow many crops there like tobacco. With Mars, we've already sent a bunch of probes there and learned a lot about it. It's not some big unknown land any more. And there simply isn't any good reason for people to go there except for basic science. You sure as hell can't grow stuff there (and even if you could, getting it back to Earth would cost a fortune; we're not really short on arable land here on Earth, and we're constantly developing ways of more efficiently using what we have, with the next big thing being vertical farming): there's little atmosphere, little water, and it's cold and too far from the Sun. The lack of a magnetosphere and too much radiation probably isn't going to be all that great for your crops either (not to mention any inhabitants). The only foreseeable thing that could be done there is mining. But we don't need to go to Mars to get minerals; we have asteroids passing close to the Earth all the time which could be mined, and have very valuable ores in them. It's also possible to mine on the Moon, which probably has mineral resources thanks to all the asteroid impacts and lack of geological activity. Both of these are far closer and more feasible than Mars. I'm sorry, but "build it and they will come" isn't a law of the universe, it's a line from a silly movie.