Your argument is so full of fallacies I hardly know where to begin. First you infer that anyone who believes robotic exploration is the most effective way to go now is a "geek." Do you believe Ballard is a geek ?(if you even know who that is). Then you disparage anyone that fits into your notion of what a geek is (which I take it to mean almost anyone with intelligence.) Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Without the "geeks" you think you would have space travel. Without the "geeks," men would still be in caves wielding clubs. I'm afraid attacking the messenger only shows ignorance, not bravado.

Those that want to push human space travel Prematurely will ironically SLOW human movement into space. If you had even a basic understanding of economics, you could realize that we will move out into space only when it can be self supporting. And the quickest way to make it self supporting is to return extensive knowledge from surveys. And the quickest and vastly less expensive way to do surveys is through robotic exploration. Pushing human exploration prematurely will suck 100's of billions of dollars out of areas the money would be better spent (to ultimately and ironically provide the stepping stones to human exploration and colonization).

Humans will not be able to explore or colonize without tremendous robotic support, both autonomous and teleoperated. Bases need to be built by robots prior to human arrival on any planet (once again economics would dictate this). I notice you made reference to peering through a 1800x1600 monitor. How about full 3d immersive virtual reality as a conduit to process the returned terabytes of robotic information? Its not far off to be affordable for the average 1st world person to be able to virtually explore other worlds (if we allow robots to go off and get the data).

It would be easy to rip into your "type" like your bigoted attack on "geeks" but it would be a waste of bandwidth like the post to which I'm responding.