OT a bit - fly to the moon or Mars?

But if the boat sinks, you probably have a life jacket, life raft, life
boat, maybe people in the area to assist, etc., in other words you might
survive without the boat or ship. Yes, everything we do has some degree of
danger, you can have a brain aneurysm straining on the toilet, etc., but
that logic has nothing to do with anything.

Now-a-days you might have a boat that could respond to save you... but
thats a VERY recent development. Hell, even the titanic sunk with a
loss of 2/3rds of the souls aboard... Imagine what it was like for
the oceanic explorers a mere 400 years ago plying the Atlantic in
wooden boats with absolutely zero chance of rescue should the **** hit
the fan... And at least a decompression death would only last a few
seconds

Yes, there is an inherent risk to anything... I'm just tremendously
thankful that the explorers who laid the foundation for the modern
world had a much different tolerance for risk than we do today...
otherwise we'd never have left our caves in africa.

My *primary* point the last few posts, has been odds of survival, and living
to fight another day

Your primary point has been based on a modern understanding of
exploration utterly irrelevant to the world in which the explorers who
tamed our world existed. I read some where that your odds of
surviving to have children as a new world explorer who settled
bordered on near 50% or less for the first hundred years... Yes the
risks now are worse... but our technology and ability to predict is
better... either way- I don't think you can argue that for a certain
segment of the population, it is a worthy risk.

I'd love to believe there was another inhabitable piece of real estate
besides earth, but so far I haven't seen a shred of evidence, and going
beyond our solar system for anything besides observation and probes would
truly be SciFi at our primitive state. Sending humans 44 million miles with
a gigantic payload, after our robotic rovers and mapping satellites have
shown Mars to be another Death Valley on steriods just doesn't make a lot of
sense to me.

Even if there was a world that supported life as we know it, any
attempt to settle would be impossible... Microbes from an alien world
would (probably) bet uttlerly beyond the capacity of the human immune
system to tolerate... the first hundred or two years of orbiting an
earth-like planet around another star would be spent merely trying to
engineer humans to survive in the new environment...

That doesn't mean we shouldn't go. That doesn't mean the struggle of
trying to sustain a colony in a sub-standard environment can't yield
valuable insight into how to maintain a sustainable colony here on
Earth. It doesn't mean that the process of trying to adapt the human
animal on an alien world wouldn't give us valuable insight into the
workings of the human body, in context of universal (as opposed to
terran) biology.

Challenge yields learning. Challenging brings risk. The risk isn't
"worth it" to you... ok, we understand. Stop trying to make that
judgement for the rest of us...

We don't agree... that's cool... but don't tell those of us willing to
risk our mortality on advancing the human species that we are wrong.

Plus the robots don't insist on a round trip ticket or need
life support 24/7. My manned explorer itch doesn't need scratched at this
point, unless new data is found.

And robot's don't experience... They don't "Understand"...
Fundamentally, that's the only thing that we humans do that makes us
notably different than the rest of the mass in the universe.

But to each their own.. If we all thought the same, it'd be a really, really boring life.

Oh so true