I just need to thank you for that and hope that you're still somehow involved in making us a more-than-one-planet species. I don't really care whether it's another planet, a space station or whatever else can ensure our survival past this beautiful blue aqua ball.
On topic, there is no debate that robotics is the key to exploring space, magnitudes of orders faster and farther than we could in flesh and blood. We could —and probably will— swarm this whole solar system or even close stars with armies of tiny (dare I say nano) drones.
A human being is a sniper bullet — one big shot, extremely powerful and focused. A swarm of robots is a fragmentation grenade — small impacts in all directions of space. If you needed to blast/repaint a whole room and only had one shot, which would you use?
It is merely an accident of history (and a reflection of misguided priorities IMHO) that we developed space-travel technology before we developed AI. But that seems to be in the process of correcting itself. It has been 50 years since we landed on the moon. I predict that in another 50 years the idea that a human can do anything better than a robot in space will be as laughable as the idea that humans can play chess better than computers.
No, you don't.
> For reference, Opportunity Rover has only traveled 45 km/28 mi in 14 years.
That's true, but that is because of budgetary constraints, not technical ones. If you put the same amount of money into a rover as it would take to send a human, you could cover a LOT more ground with autonomous rovers. This is self-evidently true because whatever vehicle you use to get a human from A to B you can instead use to move a human-mass (plus life support and consumables) worth of scientific and excavation equipment instead.
P.S. I used to work on the Mars Rover program.