I don't know where I would start if I had to send a manned spaceship to Mars, but that doesn't mean I expect nobody to know.
Where does your confidence that somebody (or some distributed group of people) knows how to send a manned spacecraft to Mars come from? It's not like anyone's ever exhibited this knowledge before.
Something must make you think "hey, sending people to Mars is possible". The important question as far as I am concerned is whether that's a good-something or a bad-something. In the case of "evolving artificial intelligence with a computer the size of a dump truck must be possible", I think it's a bad-something.
People are working on going to Mars. AFAIK, the main barrier is the cost.
Back to the original question, I can imagine where to start with evolving intelligence, but I'd need much more than a petabyte. (although, actually flops are more important than bytes here, I think)
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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