You know they are wacked when they value a "Rock" more than they value Conscious Human Life.
If the mirror the look at every morning actually reflected the truth they would realize that they are the problem and somewhere in the past missed the boat entirely.

I read his book - The Case for Mars, loved it, and very much common sense-oriented. He criticized the NASA method of going to Mars as Battle Star Galactica to pick up some rocks, plant a flag, and come home after a couple of days. He calls for sending small supply ships in advance, manufacturing rocket fuel on the surface of Mars with a refinery sent in advance (we know the raw materials are there), send habitats in advance with supplies to cultivate crops and extract water from the soil & atmosphere, then 'live off the land' until the orbital window returns for a low-energy return flight. His argument is pretty sound - when we went to the new world, when we went west, when we went to Alaska, we lived off the land and we didn't come back. Many starved, many died, but we persevered and that pioneering spirit still exists.

Don't dink around with cultivating ridiculous levels of organic engineering degrees mixed with flight physics, send greater numbers of people that are entrepreneurial problem solvers - the same ones that mined for silver and gold. Yes, it's a hostile environment, but was the Yukon any less so? How about the first person to reach the North Pole or the first person to cross Antarctica. Now we have people that live in Antarctic habs year-round, in greater numbers than you might think - 1000s actually, and they range from climate scientists to the power generation technicians and engineers to the people running the snack bars. You can't leave the hab in Antarctica either about 9 months out of the year.

Eventually, we will build enough infrastructure on Mars that we won't need to come back or send more supplies, but you have to take the first step forward and 'begin'.

Bob was my "frienemy" when he was the team leader of Pioneer Rocketplane, and we were both competing to establish suborbital space tourism. Brilliant guy, dreamed up the "Mars First" concept of delivering the infrastructure for a Mars colony before sending people. He's also a proponent of methanol as an alternative fuel, and has well-founded technical and economic analysis to back it.