[cletus]

> IMO, the original moon landings didn’t make a lot of sense

The Space Race made perfect sense. It was a political exercise. a proxy for war between nuclear powers. As long as civilizations have existed they've built monuments and undertaken massive tasks as a political exercise.

> ... why should we stop them?

Who said anything about stopping them? My argument is it won't happen because the costs are so high and there's no hope of a return from that.

People like to bring up human exploration as some kind of argument but every aspect of human exploration has been an economic activity. In the Middle Ages, European colonialism was pure exploitation. Columbus's famous journey West was to find a faster way to India... for exploitation.

There is literally nothing we could produce or extract on Mars that would make economic sense to bring back to Earth.