Because of our biology. Robots can do just fine with ×3 times less gravity and no water and food.

iRobot sends robots to humans all the time!

They work okay.

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I gave you an upvote even though you did not use the obligatory /s. It was the transparent spheres i liked the best.

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Looking forward to the private spacecraft companies appropriating this and saying that "the free market" gave us deep space travel.

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Imagine a plane ride that takes a year, but infinitely more dangerous. Once you arrive to your destination you find there are no return flights, and it is nothing like the tourism brochure pictured at all. That’s why we send robots.

Don't let the rednecks in Alabama hear you say that

That is the endgame, but right now that is logistically impossible. It would be a one way trip that would take at least a year to complete. You would need a ton of supplies to have the crew survive.

Robots don't need food, water, ... For the long voyage there. They don't need a return trip back home. They can do work in more hostile environments than we can. All of that means that robots can start working there much earlier than humans can.

At the present moment there isn’t much benefit to sending up humans. It would essentially be sending them there to live out their lives on Mars. For now it makes more sense to just continue collecting data until we have more advances in technology.

Very expensive and very risky. We don't yet have a rocket or crew capsule capable of sending humans that far yet, let alone bringing them home. So robots have been much cheaper and safer in the meantime.

For research. Humans can't stay there as long as robots can. Well, not yet.

Because we do not have the technology established on Mars right now to sustain life or bring them back so basically they would be there just to die.

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No, on a long enough time scale most of the junk will precipitate down onto Earth, very few orbits are so stable as to be permanent, but that would cut us off for many years.

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My latest thinking on it is we won't be doing anything until we are downloadable.

Quantum Computing- 10 years, 50, or 1000 years from now to never, I rule out never because it's happening, is a fundamental outcome of evolution, and once fully replicated we are off to meet the aliens, just one little stumbling block a vexing thing called lightspeed.