There are a lot of good points in this article but this comment overlooks one thing: "I’ll admit there still may be an outside chance that some consortium will

There are a lot of good points in this article but this comment overlooks one thing: "I’ll admit there still may be an outside chance that some consortium will fund and execute a mission to send a few poor, intrepid souls on a one-way trip to live short lives on Mars in a gruesome experiment, televised for all to watch." There are people willing to make the one-way trip, and the ethics of this have been discussed at length [1] But it seems to me that the one thing we would have to probably "let go" of is worrying about "contaminating" Mars. [1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/04/death_in_space_the_ethics_of_dealing_with_astronauts_bodies.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/0...