It's not about a death wish at all, but about being aware of the inherent risks, which most people are not. For instance internal estimates of the Moon landings were extremely stark. The prevailing mindset at NASA was around 50/50 - James Webb himself was quoted saying as much. Neil Armstrong was optimistic and thought they had about a 90% chance of survival, Aldrin felt they had about a 66% chance. This is why eulogies for these astronauts were written before they even set foot on the launch pad.
The fact that we nailed each Moon landing was thanks largely to good fortune. There's just so many unknown unknowns that you simply cannot get risk down to levels where failure is not a very real possibility. And in fact even the original Moon landing very nearly ended in catastrophe and only succeeded due to some superhuman piloting and good luck on top. The autopilot was going to set them down in a boulder strewn area so Armstrong took manual control and ended up landing with less than a minute of fuel remaining. And even when landing, he failed to carry out a process (immediate shut down) that was thought necessary to avoid a catastrophic failure by NASA. But with ever-recurring good fortune, they were wrong.
I would highly recommend "Failure Is Not An Option" [1] by chief flight director Gene Krantz. What I am talking about is an acceptance that substantial risk is simply going to be involved in space flight for the foreseeable future, and very possibly forever. And now space flight to distances further than ever, with the goal of starting an entirely new civilization, for the first time ever? I think it's extremely important to accept and acknowledge that this will involve plenty of death, so as to ensure that those who do sign up are fully aware of the risks. Armstrong was probably lying to himself there thinking they had a 90% chance of survival, and that's not good for anybody.
I see, and I agree that this simple is a very dangerous venture. But I stand by my opinion that we should try to eliminate all risk we can, anything else would be negligence. And that includes incrementally scaling up missions once were reasonably confident in the general primitives, like how does a human being behave if they're trapped in a tin can for a year with others, how bad is radiation during the journey and on Mars for squishy bodies, or does being exposed to microgravity for a prolonged amount of time fuck with people's reproductive abilities, none of which we have answers for, or a way to collect them, without sending small and controlled missions.
Well we do have answers to many of these questions already. For instance the longest ISS stay is 437 days, contrasted against the ~100 days to get to Mars. And the ISS is a claustrophobic cave contrasted against the Starship. The ISS is made of various modules. The zvezda/"star" module is a major support and living module, with a total habitable volume of 47m^3. Starship has 1000m^3 (which is equal to the volume of the entire ISS). Of course lots of that will be used for supplies, but the nature of the planned missions (multiple ships, supplies/fuel/etc distributed among other ships in the fleet) means a very sizable chunk of it will be available for habitation.
There's also a lot of misconceptions about things like radiation. In general short extremely high energy bursts of solar weather can be quite dangerous. But it turns out that the Starship will already have a rather large volume of appropriate shielding - water! That shield can be used on an as-needed basis because you can see these events coming from far away (yet again, advantages the earlier colonists would not have had).
The ambient radiation is much less of a concern. The worst case scenario is you end up shaving some years off your average life expectancy with a higher overall chance of cancer, but there are some super interesting studies in places like Ramsar, Iran [1]. Ramsar is the most naturally radiated habitated location on Earth, with orders of magnitude higher radiation levels than generally recommended as safe. According to contemporary radiation-cancer models, increased cancer rates should be trivially detectable. Instead they actually seem to be showing a slightly reduced rate of cancer, which some have posited may be attributable to radio-adaptive effects in play! Presumably this would not be true of the first generation(s), but it suggests some extremely exciting generational possibilities.
Basically I would say here that anything a small mission can do, a larger one could do - more safely, more reliably, more efficienctly, with more data, and just generally better chances of success. The costs when you do fail will be higher, but the chances of failure will be lower, and the overall rate of progress will be dramatically higher.
The fact that we nailed each Moon landing was thanks largely to good fortune. There's just so many unknown unknowns that you simply cannot get risk down to levels where failure is not a very real possibility. And in fact even the original Moon landing very nearly ended in catastrophe and only succeeded due to some superhuman piloting and good luck on top. The autopilot was going to set them down in a boulder strewn area so Armstrong took manual control and ended up landing with less than a minute of fuel remaining. And even when landing, he failed to carry out a process (immediate shut down) that was thought necessary to avoid a catastrophic failure by NASA. But with ever-recurring good fortune, they were wrong.
I would highly recommend "Failure Is Not An Option" [1] by chief flight director Gene Krantz. What I am talking about is an acceptance that substantial risk is simply going to be involved in space flight for the foreseeable future, and very possibly forever. And now space flight to distances further than ever, with the goal of starting an entirely new civilization, for the first time ever? I think it's extremely important to accept and acknowledge that this will involve plenty of death, so as to ensure that those who do sign up are fully aware of the risks. Armstrong was probably lying to himself there thinking they had a 90% chance of survival, and that's not good for anybody.
[1] - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Failure-Is-Not-an-Opt...