The problem with your argument isn't lack of rationality, it's that it signals a lack of faith (destructive narrative). As others have mentioned, you can't "kill Mars" because who is going to be the hero then? You have to replace the idea of Mars with a better one, which allows for a constructive narrative in people's minds. BTW, that's essential in any constructive criticism of anything really. Simply saying "it's bad" isn't sufficient if you actually want people to think about alternatives - you have to present a better constructive narrative that could be accepted as "even cooler" by believers. I fully agree with almost everything you write in the article btw - IMO Pheobe, Titan, or Ceres could be a viable long-term goal for colonization after the moon. I'm sure there are many others, but we need to actively talk about and analyze these to identify the best option.
> you have to present a better constructive narrative that could be accepted as "even cooler" by believers
The article mentions some alternatives.
>> One path forward would be to build on the technological revolution of the past fifty years and go explore the hell out of space with robots. This future is available to us right now. Simply redirecting the $11.6 billion budget for human space flight would be enough to staff up the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and go from launching one major project per decade to multiple planetary probes and telescopes a year. It would be the start of the greatest era of discovery in history.
If your space software project is late, just throw more people at it - it will be done that much faster!
Like really, even if you indeed made the JPL budget 100x bigger, at least short term you would indeed have the issue if not enough people being available to build and run all those robotic missions.
I'd think that "send modern probes to every one of the interesting moons of saturn and Jupiter" would be pretty amazing. For all we know one of them could be crawling with life!
