Science-fiction is the business of prediction. We get paid to extrapolate.

So, extrapolate I shall.

It seems to me that with software taking up more and more of the work functions that once were done by humans as their jobs, we will begin to see a whole lot of people with nothing to do. Sure, I guess a lot of people (like myself) would be glad to ditch the day job and do whatever it is they live for -- some kind of art or perhaps even go into the sciences. But we're still going to have a whole bunch of people whose jobs have simply vanished. So either we're going to have a lot of bums and slackers or we're going to have to find something for these people to do. They're still going to have to make a living somehow, and just how much make-work can we generate in an economy that gives such things over to machines?

Call me crazy but this seems like the absolute perfect opportunity to send people to Mars.

In a culture where the machines are doing all the real work and the humans have made it to that golden ideal of doing only what they want, pretty soon I'd expect we'd begin to turn to mush and devolve. Barring such history-resetting disasters like asteroid collision, electromagnetic pulse disaster or some such other catastrophe, we'd all just be sitting here writing trashy romance novels and painting murals. Sure it's all one big party but there's no struggle to survive to make us keep progressing. All this excess brain power, all these nifty machines that can do the work, and we just sit here? If we want the human species to remain vital we would have to leave the planet and go somewhere where we would face new challenges. Mars is the perfect place.

All species have two goals -- survival and reproduction. What are we supposed to do if we're just given everything? Either we go down that dark road to mush and extinction, or we send the human spore out into the universe. It's challenges like this that make a species stronger. Did we come all this way simply to dry up and die on the edge of the lake when we could have tried our luck on the land?

I don't know why people are so blind.