A ridiculous proposition. Anyone who can not think of a potential profit motive for going to Mars isn't thinking very big or very long.
Um, do you have any experience in scientific exploration, or even terrestrial expeditions of any kind? This reads like too much like armchair warrior, sorry....
Do you expect only astronauts to speak about travelling to other planets? Be real. I've been to as many different countries and places on Earth as I can afford (on the order of maybe 15 or so). Regardless, obviously when it comes to space exploration I have little to no experience (I have been through many interviews at SpaceX but do not yet have a job there). Shouldn't we be encouraging people to speculate about profit in the planets and the stars, rather than belittling them with the idea that we are "armchair warrior"s?
As for scientific exploration: I have collected more than ten million individual measurements of atmospheric pressure across the whole globe over the last year. I intend to use this data to learn more about short-term weather patterns and to generally improve humanity's understanding of the atmosphere.
So there's some physical exploration of Earth in my past, and some scientific exploration of Earth in my present, while working my ass off to attain the goal of space exploration in my future.
It is not so much an as-hominem attack as a reality check on the level of abstraction. The rocks that came back from the moon are (for insurance purposes) "priceless", but yet the moon was not a for-profit expedition. On the contrary, why not sell some "priceless" rocks for an infinite sum and alleviate world hunger? But somewhere in-between what sounds logical and what is reasonable to expect there intervenes some other considerations.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad.
None of this is to discourage. Its more to get the dialogue on a track where what is actually hard is actually at least given some respect.
Um, do you have any experience in scientific exploration, or even terrestrial expeditions of any kind? This reads like too much like armchair warrior, sorry....