I agree that redundancy is a good way to mitigate risk, but there are so many problems between us and successfully colonizing another world that this is basically a pipe dream.
Astronauts experience a lot of health issues.
After less than a month in space, the tubules that fine-tune calcium and salt balance showed signs of shrinkage, which the researchers say was likely due to microgravity rather than GCR.
The study suggests that optic disc edema and choroidal folding contribute to spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, whose symptoms include headaches and visual impairment such as far-sightedness (hyperopia), which causes near objects to appear blurred due to lower visual acuity at short range.
The scientists said the heart tissues “really don’t fare well in space,” and over time, the tissues aboard the space station beat about half as strong as tissues from the same source kept on Earth. […] Previous studies showed that some astronauts return to Earth from outer space with age-related conditions, including reduced heart muscle function and arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats), and that some, but not all, effects dissipate over time after their return.
And of course there’s all the problems caused by radiation exposure once you’re outside the Earth’s magnetic field (Mars doesn’t have a global magnetic field). Basically, we can put ourselves in a tin can and venture into space, but the human body evolved in Earth’s gravity and radiation profile and it doesn’t do well outside of that. At the present you’d have to be suicidal to try to live long-term away from Earth, and I don’t think these are problems that we can just engineer our way out of.
None of those problems get solved if you use the enormity of the task to excuse giving up. Everyone working on these projects is well aware of these issues. It does not devalue the work. But do not confuse my support of continuing towards the goal with support for goofballs like Elon Musk.
If we had listened to people like you during the infancy of the US space program we would have deprived the world of a lot of technological progress.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon… We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
