Men on Mars
A base on Mars is right behind a base on the moon in terms of space expectations. Despite that, the closest we’ve come is sending rovers to send back pictures and take samples. Sure, we’ve discovered water on the red planet, but we’re still a long way away from sending people to Mars. The Wikipedia page for Mars exploration is lacking in almost any detail about manned missions, as is NASA’s page. The “Mars to Stay” wikipedia entry and the page for Manned missions to Mars both feature a lot of good information about putting humans on Mars, however the fact remains that the earliest dates for launch are placed many years out- with NASA hinting that they might be ready by 2037. 27 years from now.
Teleportation
We can probably thank Star Trek for making teleportation something that we expect in the future. The technology has showed up in countless video games and films, being treated more like a given future tech than a barely plausible possibility for transportation. This article from IBM research is a good read, and has links to other articles, but makes the point that we are nowhere near being able to teleport objects, let alone people. Teleportation is an incredibly difficult concept, presented in an extremely simplistic way in pop culture. Consider that we aren’t close to sending people to Mars, and teleportation is- at it’s core- the disassembling and reassembling of atoms in the same way they were assembled before being transmitted. Imagine how difficult it would be to send something as simple as a die from one place to another, and then consider how complex humans are compared to dice. Any opinions?
