<It's 100 times less expensive to send robots to Mars than humans.
I'm too impatient to find out what's out there to wait for humans. So, we send robots.
The robot technology gets better and better, while humans will require some confort, won't ever shrink in size and have to do numerous other things beside being merely productive to the mission.

This is a good point. Robot explorers have come a long way since I watched Viking paint a picture of its foot on TV one stripe at a time.

It needs to be remembered that unlike many other technologies, robotics, computers and electronics have gotten orders of magnitude better and orders of magnitude cheaper. All else being equal, Mars explorer costs are pretty much almost a matter of transportation costs now.

With some heavy-duty relay satellites in Mars orbit--still much cheaper than manned exploration--we could get vast quantities of science and visual data in near-real time from rovers and other surface explorers. Control could also take place in near-real time, although the rovers would have to be slow enough so you couldn't run off a cliff while waiting for the signal delays.

I'd like to see manned exploration as much as anyone, but I think we are going to see some great things out of robots in the next few years too.