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Reading through the comments from the main article it seems the commentators are in two camps: 1) "...let's improve our engineering capabilities to solve this i

Reading through the comments from the main article it seems the commentators are in two camps: 1) "...let's improve our engineering capabilities to solve this intriguing challenge..." [and later enjoy all the other side-benefits that come from being great engineers and problem-solvers]; and 2) why challenge ourselves in the first place [?]. I like to encourage and invest in visionary [and realistic] problem-solvers.

dekhn 10y ago
camp 3 (I'm in this one): instead of spending money on humans in space, let's spend that money on robots in space. Once you don't have to deal with all the ugly details of keeping humans alive in space, you have a lot more budget for exploration, discovery, science. You can cover a lot more areas, and the likely payoffs are higher. Growing crops in space has no real scientific benefits for the nearterm future. It's a "nice to have" not a "visionary" thing.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  We already have robots in space, such as the Mars rovers. It doesn't work that well: the round-trip communication time is very long, so it takes a long time for mission controllers on the Earth to get data from the robots, make a decision, and send that back. By contrast, a geologist walking around on Mars can make his own decisions on the spot and get a lot more done, much more quickly.
  - dekhn 10y ago
    I've heard the same about the moon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt specifically """While on the Moon's surface, Schmitt — the only geologist in the astronaut corps — collected the rock sample designated Troctolite 76535, which has been called "without doubt the most interesting sample returned from the Moon".[8] Among other distinctions, it is the central piece of evidence suggesting that the Moon once possessed an active magnetic field.[9]""" . It was true at that time only because we didn't have good robots. The science resulting from our robot exploration is astounding. Nearly all photos of outer space objects beyond the earth and moon are robot driven, and the high quality photos of Jupiter, etc are entirely robot driven. Compare that to a Mars rock. BTW, we can't send a human to Mars right now. It's technically impossible- well, I mean, we could deliver their dead body to the surface, but that's not super useful. A single geologist on Mars would constantly have to check back in on their plans.
    - Arizhel 10y ago
      The Moon would be more realistic with modern robotics and remote-control technology, because it's 3 seconds away, for a 6-second round-trip for radio signals. It'd be quite feasible to remote-control a rover there. Mars is not. It's a minimum of a 1-hour round-trip. So every tiny little rover movement has to be planned in advance, unless you can figure out how to automate it, which only goes so far: you're not going to put an AI with a geologist's education in a rover. This is not likely to ever change, unless you can 1) figure out how to make FTL communications work (subspace?), or 2) figure out how to make AIs with human-level intelligence (at which point we humans would be completely obsolete and likely slated for extermination). Good luck with either of those. Until then, sending actual humans is the only way to get a lot done in a reasonable amount of time. The nice photos you talk about from robotic exploration is the result of completely pre-planned missions, with very little possibility of needing to make fast decisions on-site. When you're just flying around the Jupiter system or flying through the Pluto system, that's really not that hard; the planet and moons' locations can be predicted with a very high degree of accuracy, and the data they're gathering is all planned far in advance. It's not like walking around a planet's surface and deciding which rock to investigate, or which rock to ignore, or what a good place to dig would be. You can do all that by remote control, but it's a whole lot slower because you need to have humans verify everything, so what would take you an hour with a human on-site now takes you days.
      - dekhn 10y ago
        Your comment about pre-planned missions is incorrect. All missions have significant post-launch changes. For example, NASA is currently deciding what to do with Juno, and Voyager, etc, have all had changes to their trajectories. The beauty of large-scale robotic exploration is that you can use all the analysts on earth to analyze the results. Compared to a single human.
        Arizhel 10y ago
        Now you're acting like the geologist on Mars doesn't have a radio to talk to all his colleagues back on Earth. Yes, NASA has made mission changes post-launch, but these are usually simple changes, consisting basically of single orders to redirect the craft along a new trajectory. A human walking around looking at rocks makes those decisions on a second-by-second basis.

dekhn 10y ago

camp 3 (I'm in this one): instead of spending money on humans in space, let's spend that money on robots in space. Once you don't have to deal with all the ugly details of keeping humans alive in space, you have a lot more budget for exploration, discovery, science. You can cover a lot more areas, and the likely payoffs are higher. Growing crops in space has no real scientific benefits for the nearterm future. It's a "nice to have" not a "visionary" thing.

Arizhel 10y ago
We already have robots in space, such as the Mars rovers. It doesn't work that well: the round-trip communication time is very long, so it takes a long time for mission controllers on the Earth to get data from the robots, make a decision, and send that back. By contrast, a geologist walking around on Mars can make his own decisions on the spot and get a lot more done, much more quickly.
- dekhn 10y ago
  I've heard the same about the moon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt specifically """While on the Moon's surface, Schmitt — the only geologist in the astronaut corps — collected the rock sample designated Troctolite 76535, which has been called "without doubt the most interesting sample returned from the Moon".[8] Among other distinctions, it is the central piece of evidence suggesting that the Moon once possessed an active magnetic field.[9]""" . It was true at that time only because we didn't have good robots. The science resulting from our robot exploration is astounding. Nearly all photos of outer space objects beyond the earth and moon are robot driven, and the high quality photos of Jupiter, etc are entirely robot driven. Compare that to a Mars rock. BTW, we can't send a human to Mars right now. It's technically impossible- well, I mean, we could deliver their dead body to the surface, but that's not super useful. A single geologist on Mars would constantly have to check back in on their plans.
  - Arizhel 10y ago
    The Moon would be more realistic with modern robotics and remote-control technology, because it's 3 seconds away, for a 6-second round-trip for radio signals. It'd be quite feasible to remote-control a rover there. Mars is not. It's a minimum of a 1-hour round-trip. So every tiny little rover movement has to be planned in advance, unless you can figure out how to automate it, which only goes so far: you're not going to put an AI with a geologist's education in a rover. This is not likely to ever change, unless you can 1) figure out how to make FTL communications work (subspace?), or 2) figure out how to make AIs with human-level intelligence (at which point we humans would be completely obsolete and likely slated for extermination). Good luck with either of those. Until then, sending actual humans is the only way to get a lot done in a reasonable amount of time. The nice photos you talk about from robotic exploration is the result of completely pre-planned missions, with very little possibility of needing to make fast decisions on-site. When you're just flying around the Jupiter system or flying through the Pluto system, that's really not that hard; the planet and moons' locations can be predicted with a very high degree of accuracy, and the data they're gathering is all planned far in advance. It's not like walking around a planet's surface and deciding which rock to investigate, or which rock to ignore, or what a good place to dig would be. You can do all that by remote control, but it's a whole lot slower because you need to have humans verify everything, so what would take you an hour with a human on-site now takes you days.
    - dekhn 10y ago
      Your comment about pre-planned missions is incorrect. All missions have significant post-launch changes. For example, NASA is currently deciding what to do with Juno, and Voyager, etc, have all had changes to their trajectories. The beauty of large-scale robotic exploration is that you can use all the analysts on earth to analyze the results. Compared to a single human.
      - Arizhel 10y ago
        Now you're acting like the geologist on Mars doesn't have a radio to talk to all his colleagues back on Earth. Yes, NASA has made mission changes post-launch, but these are usually simple changes, consisting basically of single orders to redirect the craft along a new trajectory. A human walking around looking at rocks makes those decisions on a second-by-second basis.