Have we reached a point in robotics, computers and communications where it is cheaper, faster, more publicity friendly and more efficient to just send robots into space instead of humans? A robot can collect samples and perform tests on them on site instead of taking them home. Plus robots don’t need oxygen, food, water or shielding from radiation. A robot can also be more manuverable and stronger than a human (at least in the near future). And if a robot breaks nobody cares and there is no PR problem to clean up. Have manned missions beyond earth become obsolete?
I would say yes with the exception of a manned mission to Mars. That would be for PR and a chance for space to seem magical and daring again.
Humans are a huge liability in terms of requirements and costs versus the value that they add. The only real reason to send humans up is to study how humans can live in space. That knowledge is necessary for things like manned Mars missions.
For the R&D phase sure.
But I gotta think that unmanned trips are laying the ground work for actually going there some day.
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I don’t think so. For one thing, we as a species need to get off this rock some day if we are going to survive in the long term. Also, there is gold in them thar hills…and I seriously doubt that robots (alone) can do it all as far as exploiting it. Finally, robots are only as good as the software and designers can make them…they won’t be able to discover things or be creative on the spot like humans can. I think that, in the future, it will be a combination of robotics AND manned missions that will open up space both from a science/exploration perspective and from a commercial perspective.
-XT
Why would anyone assume this is true? The Earth will remain habitable long past any measurable span of time in terms of us as a species. Earth’s going to be habitable for hundreds of millions if not billions of years, which is longer than the Earth has had mammals, much less Homo sapiens.
Space, on the other hand, is completely unihabitable. Mars, which is at the realistic limit of our capability to travel through space, is substantially less hospitable than Antarctica. And we haven’t settled Antarctica yet, so why not start with that?
The CLIMATE on the earth won’t remain stable for those periods. Eventually we’ll have another ice age or other equally large climatic shift the other way. Also there is the odd meteor or comet strike to worry about…we are probably past due for another big one in the next several hundred thousand years. I’m fairly confident that humans, if they simply sit on their ass and do nothing, will be long gone by the time the sun starts getting froggy on us…
Er…space isn’t completley uninhabitable. Its just a very harsh environment. Mars is certainly a harsher environment than Antartica, no doubt…but so what? We haven’t settled down south mainly because there is no reason too. There IS a good reason for at least a research colony on Mars however…or the moon.
-XT
The biggest problem is that robotic exploration can be done on the (comparitively) cheap, while even the simplest manned missions have stupendous requirements. If cost was no option, then having an intelligent mobile autonomous agent on site at either the Moon or Mars would be great. But you’d have to invest in the ultimate “economy size” package: the breakeven point where you get more science for the buck using humans is at about the 300 billion dollar mark.
The primary goal of the manned space program is “exploration” - to many of us, that means sending humans to space. By definition you can’t do that with unmanned spacecraft.
If we give up that goal and decide we only need scientific data from space, we can usually do it cheaper with unmanned spacecraft. That’s nothing new - most scientific missions in the past have been unmanned. There are very few astronomical observations performed by manned spacecraft, for example. There are notable exceptions, e.g. repair missions to SMM and Hubble, but even then, it’s debatable whether it was cheaper than launching a replacement.
The “we” in “We need to get off this planet eventually.” is an extraordinarily editorial, and entirely symbolic we. Over even the longest time I have ever heard discussed by space travel enthusiasts, say five hundred years or so, that “we” will include a tiny fraction of one percent of us. A tiny fraction of a percent of one percent of one percent is only slightly more reasonable. For the overwhelming majority of the human race, Earth is it.
While I believe that even the extraordinary expense of human exploration has some justifiability, to pretend that “we” are going anywhere is just a lie. Not one in a hundred million of us have gone anywhere at all so far, even if you include low earth orbits of a few hours or days as “going somewhere”. Keep in mind that even if we send a hundred thousand colonists somewhere, that is still a fraction of a percent of a percent of the human race. I don’t see that happening in the next hundred years, if ever.
I don’t oppose space exploration. But the use of the word we in describing the process is just dishonest.
Tris
:rolleyes: (!!) When I said ‘we’ I meant ‘the human species’…not me personally (I’m much too old AND fat for such antics). In fact, I even said ‘we as a species need to get off this rock some day if we are going to survive in the long term’…which makes your comments even more baffling. And frankly ‘dishonest’ to boot.
Unless you weren’t refering to my post of course…though I think I’m the only one who made the reference in this thread.
That said, I see no reason why large groups of humans can’t eventually leave the planet in the distant future. Really the only big technological breakthroughs needed are: A) Some method of slowing aging and suspending animation in humans (this doesn’t seem all that far fetched to me), B) Building large enough space craft to hold large numbers of ‘frozen’ humans and all the stuff they would need to colonize a new planet (again, this doesn’t seem impossible to me), C) Coming up with a continuous thrust spacecraft that could move to another star in centuries (this may be a bit more difficult…but again, not impossible), and D) identifying planets within our range that are habital by humans (I’d say we’ll have this last point fairly soon…within my lifetime).
-XT
Well, I’m a researcher in AI (autonomous robotics in particular) and my wife is a geologist studying moon samples. We’ve had this debate ourselves. The thing is, while being much cheaper and allowing mission planners to ignore safety issues, robots just aren’t that advanced yet. “Autonomy” is pretty limited. Absolutely nothing (at this point in time) can compare to having a human on-site.
I was talking to a guy last summer (from Stonybrook, IIRC) who works with the Mars rovers; it was kind of frustrating, then amusing for me. See, we had totally different ideas of what autonomy implied. When he said that the rovers were totally autonomous, what he meant was that the scientists calculated a spot a couple meters away, uploaded it, and then the rover would go there. Not what I mean when I use the term.
Now, the opposing thing is that, IMO, manned spaceflight doesn’t get us a whole lot at this point. We’re still analyzing samples from moon missions that took place decades ago. Until there’s some concrete reason – and it needs to be a really stellar (pun intended) reason – that requires human capabilities, robots will do and are the best choice.
If I tell her, this should kick off another debate between my wife and I…
To the OP: yes.
What, minerals and such? If the cost-benefit is really that promising (and I have strong doubts), well, the Rover has been chugging away around Mars for 3 years now, exceeding its expected lifetime so much that its front wheel axis has worn through. The next generations of robots can, surely, dig a frigging hole.
That’s why they’ve got cameras to feed the same information to creative humans without the risk and expense of toting a delicate bag of cells about without necrosis.
The OP asks about now and the near future – I really can’t see the point of manned planetary missions any more. Of course, if people want to put someone else somewhere inconveniently far away, who am I to stop them?
Which is still far far more habitable than the atmosphere on any planet we’ve ever seen. Heck, living on top of a glacier or even underwater is a piece of cake compared to other real planets. And if the plan is to “terraform” them, heck, why not just do that to Earth?
And even the mother of all meteors at Chixulub only made most of Earth colder and even left places like Australasia largely unscathed. Again, even a mother of a meteor wouldn’t make Earth as hostile as other real planets (billions would die, of course, but we’ve gone from mere millions to billions in just a few centuries anyhow). You’d have to have literally a comet or planetoid smash into Earth to wipe humanity out. That hasn’t happened for 5 billion years when we got a new moon – not impossible, no, but not far off in probability as us living in the Matrix, IMO.
As a species, of course. The average length of time for species to hang around before being replaced by a new species is a million years. So “humans” won’t see the sun go red giant any more than my garden is filled with little flying dinosaurs.
Agreed, but “distant” is a little understated. By then, I expect AI to have advanced so far that a computerised spaceship simply takes frozen fertilised eggs and artificial wombs and nurtures these someone elses into adulthood when they arrive.
As always that depends on what you believe space missions are for in the first place. If science and exploration is all there is to it, then robots can do it much cheaper and better than man. On the other hand if you believe the space program also exists to teach man how to travel and survive in space, then that is hard to do without manned spaceflights.
There’s also the oft repeated assertion whether the (US) public will support a space program without a manned presence.
Well, is there any reason for humans to exist at all? The earth gets along fine without us.
Or is existing an end unto itself? We like existing. If part of what we like about existing is being a spacefaring species, then I don’t see how that’s any less valid a use of our resources and effort than, say, choosing to live in the Las Vegas desert.
As for the risks of ‘keeping all our eggs in one basket’ - I’m not so much worried about the earth becoming uninhabitable, but of us killing ourselves. Biological warfare, nano-warfare, nuclear warfare… Space makes a great firewall for keeping the species from wiping itself out.
If you consider the only purpose of space exploration to be the collection of scientific data, then an argument can be made for robotic and telescopic exploration only. But if we as a species want to explore and exist in space, then that’s what we want to do.
It’s certainly what I want to do.
Humans are expensive to house and feed, and the fallout in terms of bad PR for human deaths is huge. This makes NASA shy away from humans in space. the late Carl Sagan thought robots ought to do all exploration.
That said, there’s still immense prestige in getting people out there are exploring, and I’d love to see more of it. Much more. The problems are all in my first paragraph. Despite a risk level that’s far lower than it might be, or than it appears, the political consequences of failure are immense. Couple that with the truly outrageous cost of getting things to orbit, and of producing space- and vacuum-qualified hardware, and you’ve got a hard sell.
All that old science fiction I grew up on about colonizing the planets using local resources and private money – even the most realistic and best-considered, like Heinlein and Clarke and Gallun – looks less and less workable as time goes by. You gotta bring your own air and water and soil and nutrients, and every damned bit of it costs an outrageous amount. And the zero or low gravity presents a whole host of problems no one’s ever had to deal with. Who wants to be a colonist if the price is lowered resistance to disease and irreversible bone loss? Colonizing the planets is clearly going to be orders of magnitude more difficult for us that colonizing America was for Europeans.
I think a manned trip to mars is very feasible-we just have to spend the money. Colonizing mars is also feasible-excpet it will cost an IMMENSE amount of money. I don’t see that as being worth it. We should wait until we have reliable spacelevators, and rockets powere by nuclear blasts. What spend >$600 billion to do something that might cost $10 billion 25 years from now?
I wonder what would happen if they used a version of the AI in the game with the reinforcement mechanism (is it Black & White?). You program the robot with a series of actions from which it can randomly select (move, examine rock, etc). Then when the robot lands, it starts doing stuff. The monitors back on Earth either “pat it on the head” or “spank it” depending on whether or not that’s the right thing to do based on the situation on the ground. The robot starts weighting toward the “pat on the head” actions. Theoretically, they have to give it less and less feedback over time.
I’m not trying to be a dick here, but… well, let me ask you this:
What place in this solar system is as hospitable as the Earrh would be during an Ice Age?
The answer is, of course, “Nowhere.” The Earth in the worst ice age is STILL a better place for human beings to live than any other place in the solar system. No matter where we go - the Moon and Mars, realistically, are the only options at present - we would have to construct a completely artificial habitat. It would be just as easy to build habitats for humans at the bottom of the ocean as it would be to build them on Mars.
Oh, that’s certain. The thing is, we’ll be long gone by then even if we send a few people to Mars. There’s no reason to believe a complex species can last that long, and it’s pointless to worry about something that will happen a billion years from now.
What is that, exactly? Give me one reason we NEED to have populations on Mars or the Moon that isn’t wholly circular. The Moon is a giant rock. Living there would be like living at the top of Mount Everest, except with no air. Why?
A research base, well, sure, I’d support that, but what you implied was long term habitation:
You say we don’t settle Antarctica “because there’s no reason to.” Well, why is Mars a better option? What does Mars give you that Antarctica doesn’t? It’s much, much, much easier to get to Antarctica. We could ship people there tomorrow, set up habitats tomorrow, and the space is enormous - for comparison’s sake, Antarctica is quite a bit larger than Canada. Mars is ten thousand times harder.
I suspect the reason is pretty simple; Mars is cool. It would be cool to go to Mars. Antarctica is not cool. People have been there, are there now, so whoop-dee-doo. This is essentially the Sam Stone argument, which I find FAR more compelling than nonsense about how we have to go into space. We should go into space because we simply want to.
You aren’t being a dick. You are making valid points. We just talkin here, right? 
True enough. We have, however, progressed a bit beyond flint tools and animal skins since then. The South Pole is ALSO not as hospitable as the earth was around the Ice Age…yet we have research stations there, no?
Thats true. No where else in the solar system is as hospitable as the Earth was even at its worst during the Ice Age. Why should this necessarily stop us from manned exploration though? Why should it stop us from perminent manned research stations on the Moon or Mars? As I said, we have progressed a bit beyond stone tools and bear skins since then…i.e. we have the technology to live in those places. In theory at least our technology will continue to advance making it both easier and more cost effective in the future as well…IF we take an interest in manned space exploration and push the envelop.
Your point about the oceans is well put…why do we explore them when THEY are more inhospitable than the Earth was during the Ice Age as well?
Well, I think we COULD build a self sustainable colony on Mars if we wanted too. However, my real point was more along the lines that Mars and solar system exploration with perminent manned research facilities is merely the first step. In theory at least its plausable that OTHER planets in other solar systems that can support human and terrestial life will be found in the next few decades. And its again theoretically possible that, with our experience in sustaining life in the solar system outside of Earth, that THOSE planets could be colonized at some point.
I also don’t think we have a few billion years before the next big disaster hits the Earth. Hundreds of thousands of years perhaps…maybe a few million. Certainly it won’t affect ME…but I happen to think that intelligent life is very rare in the universe (perhaps even unique), and that it behooves the human species not to have all its eggs in one basket. Just my own opinion there.
Why do we NEED to have research facilities on the ice packs in antartica? Why do we NEED to explore the ocean depths? I don’t see it as a circular arguement…I see it as an insite to our species. We NEED to explore and expand.
As to what the Moon has, well, it makes a hell of a good place to put observation instruments. Its interesting in itself and there is still plenty to learn there. There is the possibility that there is frozen water there which would be interesting in and of itself. There is also lots of exploitable resources there (rare metals, helium III, etc). And finally its a stepping stone to our being ABLE to live in harsh environments outside this planet. It will push us to have to develop new technologies and proceedures that could be quite useful in the future. Mars is even more so…more things to explore and learn, more challenges to overcome (we could, for instance, learn if terraforming is practical or even possible…we have a whole dead planet to play with as a learning excersize), etc etc.
Actually, IIRC the reason we as a species didn’t settle in Antartica is because the various world powers decide that only research facilities would be allowed. I have no doubts that if that was lifted some folks would settle there…if for no other reason that to exploit the vast resources there. So no…we could ship people there tomorrow even if we wanted too. Nor can anyone else.
As for what Mars gives us that Antartica doesn’t…its another freaking world for gods sake. It gives us a LOT more than Antartica does with respect to knowledge. Its got vastly more resources than Antartica does. And of course, if a big rock smashes into the earth, it won’t be any safer in Antartica than it is in Detroit.
Certainly it would be cool. It WAS cool to go to Antartica as well…in fact I’d love to go there myself. But Mars isn’t all about being cool. There is a lot of practical stuff we could do there…stuff that frankly it would take centuries to do via the ‘shoot robot out, hope it lands, get data from aproximately a football field size piece of Mars…rinse and repeat’ method. One long duration manned mission to Mars could potentially increase our knowledge of the planet many fold over what we’ve gotten in the last few decades.
As for the last bit there…of course its all about what we want to do. It always has been with our species. If we were the sit on your ass kind of species we’d still be roaming the savannas in Africa.
-XT