Politicians raided Social Security over the years once they moved it to the General Fund (almost 40 trillion supposedly) and drained the fund so now SS will be bankrupt in 2033. With that monster looming on the horizon, a crumbling infrastructure, and robotics doing away with many jobs in the US they just don’t have the money to spend on a flight to Mars.

NASA hasn’t had a big budget since approx 1970, when the Apollo program peaked.

It seems NASA was a product of the cold war era when the U.S. had to compete with the Russians to show who was the most technologically advanced. Now, with the U.S. so heavily in debt we’re seeing budgets like NASA’s drop every single year, with no end in sight. Take a look at those OMB charts, they’re very real and sobering.

It’s not that we just can’t get a half trillion dollars for a mars mission, we can’t get 10/20/30 billion to put humans into low earth orbit. It’s going to take several decades(more like generations) for the U.S. to have enough money to send humans to another world again.

PS….. John Glenn will be laid out at the Ohio State House, link has more details

http://www.10tv.com/article/john-glenn-public-viewing-ohio-extend-8-hours

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Hubble is still up there generating images. We’ve certainly come a long way since TIME magazine put Hubble on the cover in the 80’s with grainy images suggesting scientist’s theories about water on Mars might not be off the mark.

Mars is significantly smaller than Earth and the gravity is only around 40% or so.

Still, I think Mars is a very reasonable place to set up a human colony. I think humanity
will build things unimaginable 1000 years from now and within 10,000 years I think we’ll be an
interstellar species as long as we partition ourselves on multiple planets and outposts.

Our survival depends on going to Mars. Why? Because we will eventually get to the point where
something completely wipes out our species on a planet like earth (a super bug or plague). Being on Mars is
like a partition. Stephen Hawkings and others make this argument.

We can simply live underground on Mars until other means our created to block the radiation.
Ideal areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_lava_tube
Take a look at those.

As humans evolve and colonize the solar system and eventually become interstellar, we will evolve past the need
for religion and other things.

As far as life on mars, I really can’t see there being much life early in the solar system other than
through the internal heat on mars.
Reason? The sun was cooler at the beginning of the formation of the solar system. Remember that earth receives
much more solar energy per area than mars and at one point in earth’s history it was a snowball (competely, or close to, covered in ice)

Conclusion:

We will eventually colonize and live on mars. Human’s will engineer themselves to be smarter and have
favorable characteristics. Eventually genes won’t even matter as you can just change things on the fly through
improved technology.
Most people will not even need to work and things will be plentiful still.