I'm a lot less educated on the subject and my views are diametrically opposed to yours. Commentary like yours is mostly what has kept me hanging around HN all these years.

I'm surprised that a researcher wouldn't be enthusiastic about being able to do science directly on the planet's surface. Sure, an extended human presence there will require a lot of supporting infrastructure, and sure, that will all have a direct effect on whatever might already be there -- or might not be, and in either case, changing that environment might not be desirable.

But even at the current faster speed of remote exploration of the planet, you can expect, what, like 3 more robotic missions to Mars before you retire? And each one will be an iterative improvement over the last.

There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around. What's your position on that?

Hey! Sorry I took so long to reply. The commenter below you is somewhat correct that I would identify as a 'Red' in Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy.

I am not opposed to scientific exploration at all, (I work with several people who run Ops on MSL and Percy), but putting people on the surface requires much more infrastructure and expense. A sample return mission is already extremely complex and costly, and would be orders of magnitude more so if the mission also had to support human life.

Further, terraforming Mars so that people could go explore it seems completely backwards, since you would be altering the conditions you would be studying.

To your question:

>There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around.

I'm not even sure what those would be. Almost any question we could want answered could be solved with a probe or a rover. Obviously there are questions we can't answer right now, but those are largely because we send rovers that are specialized in some areas, and totally ignorant of others. To answer those questions, it would be simpler, cheaper, and better for Mars to send more robots than to send people in my view.

He is a Mars researcher, as in he finds it very appreciable it’s current state. Basically a Martian, you are suggesting we develop and add malls to his beloved nature homeland.

Please stop contributing to the recent HN trend of putting words in other people's mouths just so you can ridicule them. I'm not "suggesting" any such thing, and if you aren't professionally in ~OmicronCeti's field of study, then I'm not interested in your opinion anyway.

I think national parks have value, but not infinite value. We should weigh up using somewhere as a preserve against other potential uses.

There are millions of Mars-like planets out there in the galaxy. I'd be more than happy to preserve, say, 10% of them. But there's only one that's in the right place to be the next step for humanity.

As I said elsewhere, I do not believe we will ever travel beyond our own solar system so we should preserve what we already have close by, instead of counting on pristine worlds elsewhere.

Pick a different planet to preserve.

Thoughtful response, thanks for your participation.

Venus is very easy to preserve.

Then he would have to do another PhD!

To me, if mars had life in its past and no longer does then we could consider it one huge grave. Lost in the terraforming debate I read is that any atmosphere we managed to kick up would be temporary. It might take a long time to leak off, but they’re not discussing any means to reverse the trend. As I understand, Mars doesn’t have an active core and thus magnetic field holding its atmosphere in place. There’s no way we’re going to fire up a core…

Turning choice, large asteroids into liveable habitats seems an infinitely more productive task.

Firing up a core is hard, but laying superconducting cables around the equator is not particularly hard (probably easier than terraforming). It could replicate a magnetosphere just fine, while also functioning as a planet wide electricity grid and a decade-long battery.

“Temporary” == millions of years.