Ehh, I don't think it's really a yes or no question. There are many obvious advantages to sending up unmanned spacecraft. Not necessarily "robots", per se, but complex spacecraft and instrument payloads. You can't exactly send up a dude and tell him to roll down the window, stick his hand out the door, and report back the ion species and energy distributions as you're passing through a region of interest. His buddy over there has shaky hands from his morning coffee, so the values he recorded from his handheld magnetometer are a little smudged. In a nutshell, space science is best left to robots, aside from the science that pertains to humans' ability to survive in space and on extraterrestrial bodies. And we have the gist of that figured out. We know that we have some serious problems to overcome before setting up a sustainable colony anywhere outside of LEO, even at one of the lunar poles. Everyone is Mars crazy right now. Sending anyone there without some Caterpillar-esque heavy machinery to burrow deep under the surface is a death sentence. Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere, and the atmosphere is ~300 times less dense than Earth's, so it has no mechanism to shield us from galactic cosmic rays or solar radiation. Talk of a Mars mission in the 2030's is still ridiculous to me, unless we're ordaining it the new Australia and upholding capitol punishment. We will have to send HUGE payloads to Mars to conduct some serious terraforming, and the odds are that even if we do all of our homework right, the process will take centuries before it's habitable in any sustainable way. Right now, it does look like it's best to hand off the baton to the bots. Eventually, we will work alongside them on multiple colonies, after they've made the bed for us. And, from a cost perspective, mk nailed it in his analysis. The QA is already bad enough for unmanned missions (my most recent rant here), and risking human life will hike up your costs another order of magnitude or so. Again, we can just solve this problem by treating early colonization missions as capitol punishment, or sending up borderline-suicidal astronauts, but some of us have morals and shit.
I wonder about this. If we try to put a date on it, optimistically, we are at least 15 years out. Realistically, it's 25 or more. It is reasonable to assume that AI will be so improved over that time, that robots will not only be almost as mentally flexible as humans (if not more so), but physically they will be leaps and bounds ahead. At that point, I think we are left with the question: Why are we going to Mars? If it is only to explore and understand Mars, then it is likely that we needn't ever set foot there to accomplish those goals. However, if the reason is 'to be there', or 'to spread our species across multiple planets', then I can see it happening. Perhaps more likely, the reason will be 'to get there before X country does'. At any rate, I don't believe that a one-way trip is immoral if it is to accomplish the first two of those objectives. Unfortunately, the third objective is the one that would be more likely to make it happen. As an aside, since Mars has 1/3 the gravitational pull, the machinery required to build underground bunkers might not need to be that heavy. Soldiers built bomb-resistant shelters in WWI by hand. My father often had to dig two foxholes in one evening in Vietnam. Given a few days, a few people might be able to make an impressive bunker with dirt that is so much lighter, and any ceiling materials could hold that much more. I think I read that about 2 meters of dirt would provide adequate protection. You could start at a bluff, fill sandbags, etc.Eventually, we will work alongside them on multiple colonies, after they've made the bed for us.
At any rate, I don't believe that a one-way trip is immoral if it is to accomplish the first two of those objectives. Unfortunately, the third objective is the one that would be more likely to make it happen. Yeah, too true. I just still see that leading to an all-too-familiar scenario in which we visit a heavenly body without the intention of establishing any permanent and sustainable presence. We'd plant our star-spangled banner, and then die, at best maybe one or two generations later. There's no incentive for any one country to fund a colonization effort. The only way I can envision a lasting Mars base is if every first world country decides to scrape together a program primarily intended to guarantee the survival of our species. Obviously that's not happening anytime soon.If it is only to explore and understand Mars, then it is likely that we needn't ever set foot there to accomplish those goals. However, if the reason is 'to be there', or 'to spread our species across multiple planets', then I can see it happening. Perhaps more likely, the reason will be 'to get there before X country does'.