First Human on Mars

Just wondering guys, who do you think will put a man/Woman on Mars first!

Any thoughts?

Just read - http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/comment/ar ... sla-motors

None of the above, by the time we get to Mars, we'll be living in a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where terms like "Government" and "Corporation" have become meaningless .

You're such an optimist.

In my own optimistic mode, probably a multinational governmental program like the ISS. Maybe with the Chinese on board.

Cynically, I'd vote "none of the above" that at our current retrograde rate, it will be another species or the machines that gets there.

Well, there's two ways of explaining that. The other one is that we're not going to set foot on Mars any time soon. I'm guessing 22nd century at the earliest .

There's a good chance that by the time we get our *** together enough to send people that far, we may no longer be Human. We'd certainly have to overcome, or compensate for our natural failings to accomplish such a monumental undertaking. If nothing else, we're not very well adapted to Deep space, which we'd have to survive for months just to get there. I don't doubt we'd be fine on Mars, but the trip could very well kill us, or leave us too weakened to survive the landing.

We already have robots on Mars, only they're not from an Action Movie.

The reference is to the "Not human Earthlings" that get to Mars.

Yeah, I got it. There's already robots there, you get it?

The robots that are there are non sentient and under our control i think James was jokingly being pessimistic that we wont ever get our act together and it with be our sentient AI descendants that will capitalise on space after they have wiped us out in their teenage tantrum SKYNET phase.

Ah, well the time for that has passed without Skynet, retcons notwithstanding. Terminator is a great example of Dystopic Science Fiction. It serves as an effective warning, so if we can predict something like our own defense AI taking over, and trying to wipe out the human race, hopefully, we can prevent it. I prefer the middle road futurists (somewhere between Utopia, and dystopia.)

For instance, Azimov, (Incidently one of the most prolific science fact authors, ever.) tried very hard to write stories about robots that break the trope that the only thing they're good for is rampaging, and trying to exterminate us. His big idea was, why don't we program them to not do that? Unfortunately, fallible humans make fallible programs. Then, they make a movie with the same title as his seminal non-rampaging robot work, I-Robot, into a rampaging robot movie with a plot, and ending stolen from a different story by a different author.

Did I ever mention, I don't care so much for humans? Sorry, anyway, what I was referring to wasn't so much our intrinsic propensity for fuxing stuff up than our utter insuitability for surviving any extended length of time in space. We really aren't all that cut out for it. We may evolve past this stage, but I doubt it would happen in my lifetime without genetic engineering. I dare say, any Robots we send would look nothing like us, (For example the wheeled spiders we've already sent,) since this is a large part of our insuitability for deep space travel.

I think nowadays a big plan going in NASA to send a manned mission to mars to build and operate the international space station.