Reptiliandude: Thank you for your kind thoughts, and the music.

I was in a bit of a melancholy state as this experience is like living one’s life within a fish bowl so to speak, and I fell into dwelling too much upon past mistakes and wasteful activities.

Outside of seeing things through your eyes, and living among you, there really isn’t any way to effectively understand even how to communicate with you on the most rudimentary levels.

Our language is too complex and difficult to pronounce and verbalize.

People weren’t mistaken when they said that our speech sounds a bit like bird calls and modems back in the day when people used to connect their phone lines to AOL.

You can’t exactly incorporate those things into a Rosetta language course.

So, my activities here have enabled us to leap-frog over many decades of misunderstandings and inabilities to either relate to one another or to comprehend concepts unique to our respective species.

As for your Mars missions…

It is imperative that you establish a place off-world for the preservation of the human race, as the universe is a dangerous place and Earth travels a road without the convenience of falling rock signs.

An automated, high orbital facility preserving seeds and the knowledge to rebuild human civilization would be what I would advise as the top priority for your space program to consider.

Your ground based seed bank in Spitzbergen was a fine idea conceptually, for say—a nuclear war.

But this wouldn’t pan out well for a celestial impact, as after the fires and heat subsided the facility would wind up quickly buried under the rapidly falling snow and ice and entomb all of humanity’s efforts.

It is, regrettably, much too far north.

Your Mars missions seem to me to be overly ambitious and are promoted by men who ae obsessed with putting the final nail in the coffin of vitalism more than they are in creating a sustained environment lending itself to affordable space colonization.

It’s all about proving the possibility of panspermia from what I can see, slogging through the daydreams and postulations of impractical and impatient scientists.

A lunar base is more practical and would provide investors with the opportunities to make tremendous wealth via Helium-3 power advancements.

Eventually, the US dollar could conceivably be used to exclusively trade this valuable commodity and serve as a cushion to the otherwise worthless currency in much the same manner that the petrodollar is used.

The United States would have to get on with it quickly though, as China has already embarked upon a decades long plan to mine the lunar surface with the intention to link their own currency to the resources for this developing power source.

They are not to be underestimated in this regard, as they intend to put an abrupt end to the American hegemony in the Pacific.

Besides this, a lunar base would be an outstanding staging area for future efforts and the rough and abrasive lunar dust would cause problems closer to home and with it solutions that could be presented in a cost effective and timely manner.

You humans take it for granted that dirt is the same everywhere you go.

It isn’t.

And your equipment will suffer because of it and you will foolishly endanger people’s lives if you don’t advance such probabilities in a place where you can readily address those problems with both materials and solutions in close proximity to where they can be manufactured and shipped to those requiring the assistance.

The moon is not so far away as to make the transportation of those solutions too problematic.

The issue from what I have seen living among you is that there isn’t a true representation of the citizenry either in the House or the Senate.

These are mostly comprised of lawyers, who although possessing laudable oratory skills, are embarrassingly lacking in their knowledge of the sciences.

To shift lunar exploration out of their hands and into the hands of businessmen who demand a return on their investment would take such things out of the loop and put them into the hands of more responsible and knowledgeable people.

Cry against the forces of capital as much as you want to, they will be the real driving force behind explorations of this type, at least if you want any continuity.

The funds for space exploration must be taken out of the hands of those only concerned with the next election cycle, and put into the hands of those who seek wealth.

Also, it is not only politicians getting in the way…

Your species will never get off the ground with sufficient impetus if the people you depend on to promote these endevours are locked in an endless battle over philosophical interpretations of what life origins are and what life is all about.

Opinion ensconced as dogma is poisoning your sciences and setting traps to snare even your most admirable efforts.

You must consider that the only reason the United States went to the moon was to prove to the world the superiority of the capitalist economic system.

After the Soviet Union fell, so did the US government’s interest in manned space exploration.

The space shuttle program was essentially nothing more than a glorified janitorial service and a way to spy under the pretense of scientific inquiry.

So you need to wrestle the cause out of the hands of idealists like Bill Nye, and put it in the hands of the next generation of would be robber barons.

Start mining ‘gold’ on the moon in the form of Helium-3 and there will be both a ‘gold rush’ and unscrupulous men climbing over each other to establish another ‘railroad’ to get their hands on the goods.

Bear in mind that the nation who uses their currency to exclusively trade this precious and difficult to obtain commodity will be the most influential nation in the world.

Anyways, this response was a bit long but necessary to convey to you how to accomplish human space colonization in not only in the most timely and cost effective manner, but to also provide the momentum necessary for its continuance.