[beamatronic]

There are a lot of good points in this article but this comment overlooks one thing:

"I’ll admit there still may be an outside chance that some consortium will fund and execute a mission to send a few poor, intrepid souls on a one-way trip to live short lives on Mars in a gruesome experiment, televised for all to watch."

There are people willing to make the one-way trip, and the ethics of this have been discussed at length [1]

But it seems to me that the one thing we would have to probably "let go" of is worrying about "contaminating" Mars.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/0...