Humans should be a multi planetary species so we want these brave astronauts to do the exploration first for us. What they learn helps us makes the process better.
Human missions drive public interest and funding. A human putting a country's flag is 1000 time better than a rover putting a country's flag.
Humans won't be a multi planetary species. The next star is Proxima Centauri, 4.25 light-years away. We would need tens of thousands of years to reach it. Let's say we make drastic improvements and can reach it in hundreds of years (which is probably impossible without new physics)? That is just the next star, where there is no Earth.
What does that mean? Even if I'm being waaaay too optimistic about our speed, reaching the next star (only the next, again) means that we need to be able to live in space for generations.
First, we cannot even imagine how to do it (life support to reach Mars is already a fundamental problem).
Second, who would want to sacrifice their life to reach nowhere? You're 40, you're trained as an astronaut, and now I tell you that you will live the rest of your life in a spaceship, and you will die long before you have a chance to know if someone will be alive when the spaceship reaches that solar system (if it does).
Third, once you reach that solar system, you need to land on a planet. Either completely autonomously or with pilots who were born in a spaceship and somehow had to be trained by their parents who were trained by their grandparents etc. It's becoming a joke.
Fourth, if someone lands there, they still cannot survive outside of their spaceship (again, there is no Earth in the next solar system). At this point it is preposterous.
And Fifth, in case it was not enough: we're currently failing to survive on Earth, chances are that our society will have collapsed in a lot less than 100 years, and in fact most species are measurably collapsing right now (we are living in a mass extinction that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one that killed the dinosaurs, and this is without the help of climate change. Climate change is just added bonus. And the end of fossil fuels as well). So why the hell would we care if someone survives the trip to another star in hundreds (more likely thousands) of years, when billions are set to die in the next decades because of our failure to survive on Earth?
Not only it's probably impossible, but it is ridiculously useless. Better watch a good sci-fi movie.
What I find confusing is how one can be a "space exploration enthusiast" and not realise how far the next star is? Shouldn't "being an enthusiast" imply getting informed, too?
> A human putting a country's flag is 1000 time better than a rover putting a country's flag.
Not only is it more ridiculous, but the first step then would be to find a way to survive in complete autonomy in an environment that has no breathable air. No need to build rockets for that, we can put a box in the ocean and try to get people to live there in similar conditions until we get life support working.
Human missions drive public interest and funding. A human putting a country's flag is 1000 time better than a rover putting a country's flag.