People keep researching Mars missions, being two years in space, like this would be a singular even in human history because of the isolation. The fact is, humans have been doing long duration missions for quite some time. Old Nantucket whalers could be at sea for a year or two. US Navy personel on deployed aircraft carriers and submarines are at sea isolated for six months at a time, sometimes more. Old explorers on Cook's ships, Magellan's ships, were at sea for years. This has been done. We know how to do this. You have a tight captain, brutal discipline, keep people busy, and the mission continues. If there is a problem, it may only be that the crew of a presently manned Mars mission might be too small for that, but maybe we need to rethink what that crew would be?
Similarly, for all the talk of why mars, or why colonize space, no one has ever, even the left trying to be diabolical, or the right being religious nutty, ever mentioned the concept of the right to form religious colonies. Like, the pilgrims came to America to form their own fruitcake colony so they could live exactly as they wanted to under god. This gulf between science and religion, at least in the case of colonizing space, need not be so vast. Let's have a government that invests and encourages investment in space, so that, if people do want to have a tax free haven on the moon, or on mars, they can. If they want to have a pledge allegiance to the flag of mars and they think mars was made 6000 years ago, let them. Or, if people want to have a libertine sex colony on the moon, let them. The whole point of expanding into space isn't about commerce, its about, breaking away from a crowded earth that demands rules so we can all get along, in exchange for the promise of a loosely populated place where you can live, like the way you want to.
