Has anyone come out and said "we should deliberately avoid sticking a colony in Antarctica or the Sahara or on the moon, and going to Mars with no trial runs is a great idea"?
Hazarding a guess at what other people think, colonising Mars is a decades- to centuries-long guiding star that will necessarily involve putting self-contained colonies in a lot of different places. In fact, Maciej points out that reaching Mars will require a moon base, which for some reason he thinks is a negative.
The argument from the article about the relative cost-efficiency of putting people on Mars versus doing pretty much anything else is a good one, but the argument that a Mars base is in itself bad is nothing but a couple of paragraphs of ad hominem attacks about "subsistence-farming incels". I'm not convinced that there's a good reason to abandon our dreams of space colonisation, just because NASA is doing some unrealistic and wasteful things.
> Has anyone come out and said "we should deliberately avoid sticking a colony in Antarctica or the Sahara or on the moon, and going to Mars with no trial runs is a great idea"?
Yes, at least with their wallets (and quite possibly worth words too, though I can't be bothered to trawl through interviews to see if anyone asked).
As the article mentions, NASA talks about landing on Mars in the next 2 decades. Elon Musk has suggested even shorter timelines. Who else is working on Mars missions? It's not unreasonable for Maciej to limit his criticism to the foolish Mars missions that people are actually spending money on, not the wise ones we wish existed.
Hazarding a guess at what other people think, colonising Mars is a decades- to centuries-long guiding star that will necessarily involve putting self-contained colonies in a lot of different places. In fact, Maciej points out that reaching Mars will require a moon base, which for some reason he thinks is a negative.
The argument from the article about the relative cost-efficiency of putting people on Mars versus doing pretty much anything else is a good one, but the argument that a Mars base is in itself bad is nothing but a couple of paragraphs of ad hominem attacks about "subsistence-farming incels". I'm not convinced that there's a good reason to abandon our dreams of space colonisation, just because NASA is doing some unrealistic and wasteful things.