I kinda blame it on our sci-fi fiction: so far we cannot imagine a space adventure where there are no humans at the frontier. Even the most recent space-themed

I kinda blame it on our sci-fi fiction: so far we cannot imagine a space adventure where there are no humans at the frontier. Even the most recent space-themed games and movies fall to this trope. It's almost an ego sort of thing - the main characters have to be human, which comes with all the drama of first-alien-contact, life support, etc. With robots, all that risk is mitigated since there's no risk of loss of life. At the worst we have our bots self-destruct or something.