You raise a lot of good points; issues that I have thought of myself while pondering interstellar travel .... I deduced that space travel for humans is limited to our solar system. Unless or until we find a way to travel much faster than light speed.
Unfortunately, I think you are right. Though I remember reading an SF story about a "colony" ship sent out to a habitable planet system, where the colonists were deep frozen for the hundred+ year journey. They were supposed to be the first humans on this new world, and had packed all the "stuff" necessary to start a new human society - cut off from the home world. When the crew started waking up for the approach, they were met by ships from their planet, already in orbit. Seems that a few decades after the original slow colony ship had departed faster-than-light travel had been invented, and the planet had not only been colonized already - because travel was now near instantaneous there 'new and virgin' world had already become essentially a suburb of Earth. The story dealt with the psychological trauma of people picked to be pioneers on an isolated planet being dumped back into a society that had moved 100 years ahead of what they knew.
One thing I think we need to consider in a trip to Mars would be the psychological one. ... In space, on the way to Mars, you have no lifeboat, no backup and no where to go if things go wrong. How would a person(s) feel and react once they truly realize, probably in a crisis, that they are 20 million miles from Earth and there isn't anyone to help them? It will take the most stable and strong minds to make such a trip. Even then, that may not be enough - we just don't know yet.
I wonder how much different this is from the early explorers in the 1300s and 1400s who set off in their ships to see what was over the horizon? I subscribe to the notion that people like Columbus and Hudson, et al knew that there was something to be found out there, but they didn't know a whole lot more about where they were going than we know about getting to Mars. And of course their crews didn't know much at all. So obviously
humans have the ability to be isolated for a trip of this sort. The question might be, do
modern humans have what it takes? Have we raised people to be so plugged in that we can't cut those connections any more?
But despite all the obstacle in making a round trip to Mars and back, I think we could pull it off given the technology we have today. It's a matter of good planning, crew screening, and a proper budget to get everything needed.
I agree...
And to answer my own questions above.... on a trip to Mars the communication delay is in the order of 15 minutes to perhaps a couple of hours.... no video chatting, but lots of email with multi-media attachments. These voyagers would be much more "connected" than any of the early explorers. Heck, the crew of the RCMP vessel St Roch spent several years trapped in the ice in the Canadian Arctic during the 1940s.... with no help possible should something go wrong. They had radio contact, sometimes.... so their experience would be comparable to a Mars Mission. These 'horse sailors' were boys recruited from the farms to serve as policeman... not trained astronauts.
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