I'm not in favour of manned missions to other planets using current technology. Have felt that way since my mid 20's I think. There is an argument that the act of trying to get there fosters new technological innovation but I think breakthroughs in antimatter storage or antimatter engines is required. We didn't send a man to the moon without a computer, and I don't think we should bother trying to send a man to Mars without a significant breakthrough in propulsion, with orders of magnitude more efficiency, and orders higher specific impulse. And should humans really go.

What is more interesting in my opinion is Elon Musks idea to nuke Mars and warm it up. If we could terraform Mars over thousands of years we could slowly prepare to put permanent settlements there.
It will be billions of years before our sun swallows up the Earth. We should have a long term objective to terraform Mars over a very long duration. That's my take.

But politics is a whole other story and in a few thousand years, we may live in an age of sticks and stones with 'flat earth' being the dominant model for the Earth.

Good take Paul. There is too great a difference between the technology we have to put man on the moon, and the technology needed to put man on mars. It's not just how long we can stay in space - we've done that for years at a time - but, not outside the Van Allen belts. Deep Space will kill humans within just a few months and our technology is not advanced enough to protect people over longer periods. It seems our scientist are overlooking that factor, but I don't know why.