Are there good records of opinions on 1400s Europeans thoughts on sea exploration or colonial Americans thoughts on exploring the West? Curious to see if these sorts of risk averse, "practical" arguments are mirrored in those times.
Yeah there is: Spices which were not available in Europe because Ottoman Empire decided to cut off Christian Europe from silk road.
So Europeans weren't going on what if journey, but they were trying to find a way to India, bypassing Ottomans. Spanish found America and it's resources (sugar cane, tobacco, potato, corn) and Portuguese found a way around Africa to India to get back to the spice trade.
The thing is that European motivation was clearly defined, while motivation to go to Mars is not clear at all, because there is nothing valuable there at this point.
But imagine finding on the Mars an alien shipwreck from 200 milion years ago, there would be several outposts build within this decade, because technology is the spice trade of today.
The recently released Terra Invicta grand strategy game captures this quite nicely - a credible alien invasion threat makes humans do some crazy things, like multiple Mars bases in 2028 & all the good spots on Ceres already occupied by outpost.
And there is even some alien technology salvage when Alien warships happen to have a human induced accident (read 240 converted naval anti-ship cruise missiles slam into them).
Or we had the certainty that we could just plop stuff we took with us and it would provide us food. And that water rains from sky and we can keep breathing all the way...
It depends - I think some of the early explorers would welcome just gathering the resources and going back instead of fighting hostile wildlife and local residents.
