I think this post is an odd response and just proves my point. Most of this is an appeal to how amazing ancient people were. That's great. They were. You claim

I think this post is an odd response and just proves my point. Most of this is an appeal to how amazing ancient people were. That's great. They were. You claim stone age people did a lot of exploration .... But yet you say early exploration was harder than Mars exploration. I find this humorous. Stone age people could never explore Mars, we can explore Europe and Asia just fine. Which one is more difficult? I'm being serious ... You could say "oh but it was hard because they were stone age" or whatever, but the fact is, though it was hard, it was not so hard that it huge economic factors, advanced life support, contend with temperatures very extreme, etc, etc. When you say "it was amazing what they did in the bronze age with just sails," I say "Yes it was amazing and all they really needed was sails." Well, it's going to take much more than sails to explore Mars. It is just an entirely different thing. It doesn't seem like a very controversial view.