I guess you can take the boy out of the defeatist, fatalistic dystopia, but you can't ever take the defeatist, fatalistic dystopia out of the boy.

This whole article boils down to "I don't think we should go to Mars because I don't think we should, it would cost too much (limit not specified) money, it doesn't seem to benefit me immediately, and we should use robots instead, and it's all-or-nothing on the robot thing."

There are so many unstated assumptions, baked-in arbitrary limitations, and downright bizarre arguments that I'm struggling to understand what the point of the article is, if there is one beyond "stop it." I suppose if you really dislike the armchair-engineering hype factory of Elon Musk and you were looking for an armchair-engineering Space Eeyore, here's your boy?