Mountains and buried ice on Mars

Nice optimism there champ.

If I attempted to improve your visualization by adding Mars to the monitor, Mars would actually end up in the school across the street from my house. The Voyager I space probe, the farthest extent of Man's collective attempt to reach out and touch something, is about a mile and a half from my house. And Proxima Centauri, the closest star, is either a) in the vicinity of Hawaii if my "monitor" curves with the surface of the earth or b) somewhere in the outer crust if it doesn't.

Space. It's really effing big.

Without significant drag, distance becomes far less important than you might think in space. The real question is time, and people have spent a lot of time in space after 1980 vs any of those short visits to the moon. We could have built a slightly larger rocket in 1972 and sent someone to mars but we had no idea what such a trip would do to their body. And if we had tried it they would not have survived the journey even if nothing had gone wrong on the trip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records

Note: Valeri Polyakov, launched 8 January 1994 (Soyuz TM-18), stayed at Mir for 437.7 days,[1][2] during which he orbited the Earth about 7,075 times and traveled 300,765,000 km (186,887,000 mi), returning 22 March 1995 (Soyuz TM-20).

Compared to that landing on the moon was physically easy. Valeri Polyakov took a long time to recover after landing, and you don't get a lot of help when you land on mars.

While the merits of going to space are certainly arguable, stating that we haven't gotten very far from earth since 1980 is particularly irrelevant. We have been to the moon. We could go again, for less money, if we wanted to. Does the fact that we have decided not to have any bearing on the economics of spaceflight?

The linked article is not particularly convincing. Rather than begin with a short introduction and then present factual evidence for why space is infeasible, the author complains emotionally about the entertainment industry and how the public in general has inaccurate views of space.

Then he goes on to say that space is big.

Then he tells us that space is dangerous.

I seriously found it hard to finish this article. At some point the author says that if a life dingy is lost at sea edible fish may jump aboard (has this actually happened?) but hamburgers do not hit the side of space ships...Really?

Also, he says that biospheres have not been successful even though they have: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 Though the crew reported hunger, they were able to survive for two years without importing anything at all from the outside world. Though not the best possible outcome, it was essentially (to my knowledge) the first time any one has attempted to do this, at least on this scale. No doubt our technique would improve with additional research.

I could go on...but the truth is that the only thing this article proves to me is that the author doesn't want space to be a feasible option.

I am convinced that we are currently biding our time and improving our technology. It makes little sense for us to spend a ton of money getting someone to Mars now if in 20 years we can do it for a third the cost. My bet is that we will start serious space exploration in as little as a hundred years (even I am not that optimistic). But to say that the space age is dead never to be recovered is ridiculous.

Also 'few pixels' is relativistic in terms of the dpi of your monitor.

Agreed, the headline was very misleading. It makes me wonder if the OP even read the article.

Also the original headline was "Mountains and buried ice on Mars" not quite the same thing as water on Mars.