In an Oped piece in USA Today touting the idea of manned missions to Mars, Louis Friedman, the executive director emeritus of the Planetary Society, made the curious supposition that Mars is at the far limit of human aspirations for space travel.
Friedman does this by suggesting two things.
First he states that space propulsion technology and space life support systems have pretty much reached their upper limit of development. Human beings will travel in space no faster nor be sustained no longer in space than it will take to trave to Mars and back.
Next, he states the opposite about robotics and computer systems, suggesting that advances in these two areas will render human space travel beyond Mars to be unnecessary. He makes this vague statement:
Not even wrong. More like idiotic. What a failure of intellectual nerve. To read more, click here.