if we can't make it to mars (and,imho,we probably can't) then maybe we have the answer to the fermi paradox - it's to effing difficult.
A marginal mission that didn't do much other than get someone there could probably be done on a pretty short timeline.
Did you read the article? There’s no such thing as a marginal Mars mission.
Short summary: we don’t have a way to keep a crew alive in space for the 21 months that would be required to get to Mars and back.
And there’s nothing in the foreseeable future (the next 10–15 years) that changes that. How do you feed a crew for that long when getting food sent from Earth (like the space station) is not an option.
That’s one of thousands of major issues that need to be solved before even attempting a test of a Mars flight.
It took 10 Apollo test missions before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, a total of about 6 days total for the trip to the moon and back. (Of course every Mercury and Gemini flight was also a test for the moon but I’m trying to keep it simple).
A trip to Mars and back is nearly 1000 days.
It’s not gonna happen anytime soon.
If we cannot, at a nation-state level, apply ourselves to 30-50 year goals, we might as well just give up on the survival of humanity.
Of course that isn't politically possible, but the other poster seemed to be talking about our capacity as a civilization in their comment, and really, the NASA outline presented in the article doesn't do much more to demonstrate it than my silly mission above. The "interesting" level for a civilization would be to build an actual self sustaining colony on Mars, and we probably don't currently have the capacity to do that (the challenges go from having the equipment needed to being able to manufacture it).
On a more serious note, I'm really sure you could mount a very suicidal one way mission to Mars with current (and possibly 60s) technology.
Could be an interesting narrative in a SF book - Project Hail Mary from Andy Weir actually comes very close, but takes it even further.
The costs probably aren't that much higher anyway.