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Nobody is lined-up and waiting to blast-off to Mars right now

This might be true. But it still is sad. More and more hurdles against human space flights are discovered. Faster than light... good chances that it will never happen. Manned interstellar flights?
At speeds above 0.3c, which is for all its worth far too slow to get anywhere, the space dust turns into deadly and hard to shield radiation:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0610030

When a ship accelerates to a relativistic velocity above 0.3c, interstellar gas becomes a flow of relativistic nucleons, which, in itself, is nothing less than hard radiation bombarding the starship, its travelers, and all of the electronic equipment aboard.

And now even flying around within the solar system is no really reliable possible.