Unless you’re volunteering to die on Mars in the name of progress that you may in no way enable with your death, your willingness to sacrifice others rings hollow. A bunch of corpses in holes on Mars won’t in any way accelerate progress, and the specter of it might retard progress. “They’ll figure it out” has to be one of the emptiest cop-outs I’ve heard in a space full of empty cop-outs and hand waving. Trying is necessary for success, but doesn’t in any way guarantee it.

It’s also not as if Mars is some kind of lynchpin in a future of humanity in space, and if you focus too much on one target you’re blinded to other options. Keep more of an open mind and be a little less cavalier about killing people and things might turn out better than you’d expect. At least, better than the “build a mountain of smart-people corpses until the problems dissolve” approach can hope to achieve.

Or think of it this way; what you’re saying is equivalent to saying that the problem of humans not being able to fly can be solved by taking a bunch of smart people up in airplanes and pushing them out without parachutes.

I hope the plan isn't sending the A-Team to Mars. People are trivializing this idea of bootstrapping a whole civilization in a very, very, very hostile environment and I don't understand why. After two weeks, there better be a reason for that kind of mental and physical toll other than the glamour of being in a hole in Mars.

We should definitely talk one day about radiation, funding, a mass estimation for the equipment, how much it will cost to develop it -no one is selling minifactories for Mars today- and the business model of the whole thing, because if no one is paying for it, it won't even start to happen.

I'd love to see people taking this seriously for once and stop visualizing only a successful outcome there's no reason to expect with the facts we have (or don't) as of today.