What's Been and What's Ben

It is stupid to send a person to a planet. I still want to do it because it is important for the long-term survival of the species. I want us to actually go places because that is what Christopher Columbus was doing. Science-wise we should be sending bigger and better probes up. We can make stuff way smaller and better. I want to know if there is or was life on Mars. Send something to determine that. Not something guaranteed to find an unclear result. I think sending a bunch of smaller probes in a larger package of unmanned vehicles could be cool and make the mission less about a single discrete success/failure boundary. It could also allow smaller probes to have more local communication with nearby larger land devices or satellites. Just have a bunch of probes aimed at proving or disproving in different ways if life was there or not. If anything else, we would at least learn about the environment in the most similar place we have found to our own planet.