> If you're going that far though you might consider not sending intact humans at all and just sending the eggs and growing them out either artificially or in some other animal.
I don't want to meet the humans that were raised by robots in the astroid belt instead of growing up in a community of humans. I think we would need to 100x our understanding of childhood development to have a chance of raising healthy adults, much less adults that could reintegrate well into 'natural' human societies.
Fwiw, I Am Mother (2019) explores the idea of children raised by robots. Worth a watch imo.
Songs of Distant Earth by Clarke also mentions this.
> The first thing in the decision tree is "do you send a crew?" and you're trading off the hard problem of teleoperating the thing (...)
Tele-operating a whole facility and more is something where you can make huge improvements down here on earth, before you even start into space, and even make a profit from it.
The first thing in the decision tree is "do you send a crew?" and you're trading off the hard problem of teleoperating the thing (need a big advanced in autonomy) vs the hard problem of providing a habitat and liklihood that the crew doesn't come home. So yeah, sending bots ahead to build an environment is an option even on Mars. I think Wall-E.
If you're going that far though you might consider not sending intact humans at all and just sending the eggs and growing them out either artificially or in some other animal.
(I see the Ceres thing as being on the line to interstellar colonization whereas I don't see Mars as such. A likely intermediate step past that is doing something similar on an outer solar system or interstellar body, say, Titan or Pluto, powered by D-D fusion.)