6 ms·

If we, the US and/or EU, send humans to the moon and Mars, soon we will have humans, maybe a lot of humans, dead on the moon or Mars or floating in space, for m

If we, the US and/or EU, send humans to the moon and Mars, soon we will have humans, maybe a lot of humans, dead on the moon or Mars or floating in space, for maybe some thousands of years. Big, long term embarrassment. Not good. Thus, I strongly suggest we send no humans to the moon or Mars. And I strongly suggest we take this opportunity to do the research, engineering, and development of essentially robots to do what we would want humans to do on the moon or Mars. Then we will have dead robots out there, but we won't have to care so much. If China, Russia, India, etc. want to send humans to the moon or Mars, then they will have dead Chinese, Russians, Indians, etc. out there for thousands of years. Their long term embarrassment, not ours.

Faaak 4y ago
How is having a dead citizen on Mars an embarrassment ? I'd have thought that it would be pride, even.
- graycat 4y ago
  How? The person is, uh, did I mention, dead? Since our intention was not to send people out there to die, their death indicates a failure, and that is an embarrassment. If anyone is a little slow to see the embarrassment, then I'm sure the US MSM (mainstream media) would use the deaths as a grand source of shocking headlines to grab people by the heart and gut, have their eyeballs follow, and increase the ad revenue. If you like the idea of dying out there, sign up to be one of the first humans on Mars: Your chances of staying there for thousands of years are excellent. And, for your death, I doubt that will take very long, maybe less than 100 hours after you land. That is, for humans, the moon and Mars are dangerous places, wildly, outrageously dangerous. For a death on the moon or Mars, sending the body back to earth would be expensive. Leaving the body there and adding it to the growing collection of dead bodies will be for thousands of years a grand embarrassment. For a body in space, often retrieving it would be very expensive, so expensive that we are in line to have a large, growing collection of bodies out in space in whatever orbits around whatever masses. In a little more detail, out there, humans will suffer from high energy radiation, i.e., cosmic rays, and the effects of low gravity. Further, both the physical and social environments will be highly foreign and, thus, very likely harmful. Yes, soon one proposal will be to gather up the bodies on the moon or Mars, load them into a special rocket, and send them to the sun. That will be an expensive rocket and still do nothing about the bodies in orbits. Let the Chinese, etc. accumulate dead bodies. We in the US will have just dead robots, right, that can be used for spare parts! Soooooo, here in the US, just take this opportunity to research, engineer, and develop various robots. We can learn our lesson the easy way (just read what I am writing here) or the hard way. But one way or the other, we are in line to learn our lesson: (A) Sending robots into space is quite doable. (B) Due to the dangers and the really goofy environments, there is no role for humans in deep space now or anytime on the horizon. Sooooo, the humans build the robots and send the robots, not the humans. The easy way or the hard way, guys.
  - BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
    Following your argument to its logical conclusion, we should cease human activities on Earth too (otherwise, humans will die there - and we can't have that!).
    - graycat 4y ago
      Nope. Doesn't follow. Instead, we get to bury our dead, and they quickly decompose and can be forgotten about. In strong contrast, on the moon or Mars, burial would be wildly expensive, and the bodies would remain frozen and last for thousands of years. Shipping the bodies back to earth for burial or sending them to the sun, very expensive. In practice, we would just let the bodies pile up. That would be a massive embarrassment. Look, we're not in line to create societies with nice neighborhoods with couples, families, kids, etc. on the moon or Mars, in bubbles, tunnels, or anything. We're not in line to colonize them. Instead, our interests that are at all feasible will be science or military. For the science, we don't really want or need humans and their eyes, hands, or brains -- instead we need instruments, e.g., like we already have doing well on Mars. For what we can use from human eyes, hands, and brains, with some development, we can get that from robots. For the military, as we are now moving quickly just here on earth, even more so on the moon or Mars, we will want robots operating the rockets, weapons, etc. Besides, humans in the necessary bulky space suits are just not very effective at anything, not even just staying alive.
      - abduhl 4y ago
        Many bodies remain on or on the way to mountain summits like K2 and Everest. Retrieving them is prohibitively expensive. The conditions ensure that they will remain there in decomposed for centuries. Should we stop going into the mountains? It’s not an embarrassment to try to achieve an amazing task and fail. The embarrassment is giving up because you’re scared you’ll be embarrassed.
        graycat 4y ago
        > K2 and Everest Sport for a few people. Otherwise no gain. > amazing task The moon and Mars, all pain, no gain. There is no gain, utility, worthwhile accomplishment for humans in space except for just a few humans in low earth orbit. There is nothing "amazing" that we know how to do sending humans beyond low earth orbit: Yes, we can build the rockets and put people on them, but there is essentially nothing they can do out there. Instruments, robots, yes. Humans, no. The US had some men walking on the moon. While they were there, they accomplished next to nothing. In simple terms, the whole effort was a publicity stunt for US presidential politics. And, all these decades later, no human has returned -- there is a big reason for that, there is no reason for a human up there. A human needs a space suit, huge, so clumsy the human can do next to nothing productive. Else the human needs a big, complicated space ship (station, bubble, tunnel) where, again, there is not much they can do, amazing or otherwise. Gee, they could take a lot of PDF files along and read about literature, science, ..., whatever. What we want out there is instruments. If we need more, would want humans to do, we should just develop suitable robots. Otherwise what we want out there is military, where again there is no real utility for having humans there. Humans just have no real role out there. Sorry 'bout that. Robots? Yes. Humans? No. Simple. If we send humans, the main result will be collections of frozen dead bodies that will still be there 1000 years from now. That will be a big embarrassment, and all for no good reason.
noselasd 4y ago
With that attitude, we'd all be sitting inside our houses and noone would do anything of interrest or importance.
- graycat 4y ago
  > sitting inside our houses No, but the attitude is staying inside the atmosphere of earth, usually on land, and at or close to sea level. That is what we evolved for, and we are effective there. Nearly anywhere else, we're talking super big, thick, heavy, clumsy suits and, still, lots of just outrageous dangers. > anything of interrest or importance. Dying on the moon or Mars is not of much of either. Instead, for the moon or Mars, we can get a lot of interesting and important work from research, engineering, and construction of robots able to do real work on the moon or Mars. For more work that is "interesting", and maybe "important", I'm busy at it everyday, without considering the moon or Mars. Actually, so far we've done pretty well with robots on Mars. For our next effort, we need a way to clean dust off the solar panels. Our robots have given us some really good data on the sun, Mercury and Venus, Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and its rings, each of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and now the boundary between our solar system and deeper space. The Japanese have done well with robots getting samples from some asteroids -- with some interesting data, e.g., where at least some of the amino acids could have come from. For something really interesting out there, how 'bout the results from a really big gravitational wave telescope? For humans? I'm just fine, close to sea level, on land, in a house, with an Internet connection, just fine right here, thank you. You are welcome to my slot on any rocket to the moon or Mars, very welcome!
bee_rider 4y ago
We have a ton of dead humans in the ocean, it isn't considered a national embarrassment, I don't think. Accidents are sad, but their inevitability is something that everyone understands. I don't think we should colonize Mars, at least given what we've seen there. Currently, it appears to be a big, empty, inhospitable, far away rock. Getting there and then terraforming it would, I guess, require figuring out how to live in space long term, at which point why bother going down the gravity well? Once we've figured out how to live in space... there's plenty of space in space, just stay in orbit (maybe we'll have expensive tourism on planets).
- graycat 4y ago
  > We have a ton of dead humans in the ocean, it isn't considered a national embarrassment, I don't think. Accidents are sad, but their inevitability is something that everyone understands. In practice, on the moon or Mars, the dead bodies would just pile up. And otherwise there would be a lot of them in long lasting orbits. Here on earth, we don't have that problem. E.g., using side scan sonar, we just found a US destroyer 3+ miles down, in two pieces, sunk by a shot from the battleship Yamato in one of the WWII battles in the Philippine Sea. We are not bothered by the pile up of the bodies of the dead US sailors. The bodies decompose and don't pile up, and in the case of the ocean are miles deep where it is pitch black, just above freezing, with not much in life. In my original post, I didn't object to the deaths. Instead I objected to the accumulation of dead bodies that will last for thousands of years. There is no reasonably feasible way for humans to colonize either the moon or Mars. Big problems include the medical effects of high energy cosmic rays and the low gravity. Other dangers stand to be the highly foreign, restrictive, threatening, and hostile environments, even nearly the best environments we could hope to create. Even if we could get some plants to be healthy on the moon or Mars, we can't get humans healthy there. No practical way. So, we will get piles of dead bodies, and all for nothing -- the moon and Mars are so hostile to humans that there is no way humans could be at all productive on either. Robots? Fine. Humans? No reasonably feasible way, and with a result of piles of dead bodies. Sorry 'bout that. It's not at all complicated.
  - yellowapple 4y ago
kabdib 4y ago
People die all the time. It's a natural and (we are pretty sure) unavoidable side-effect of living. It might be awkward and untidy, but so is pooping. The universe makes no value judgements. It's not embarrassing, it's life. If I went to Mars and died, meh, no big deal. Sorry about the mess. Feel free to recycle me any way you want, I certainly won't care. I've read some science fiction where they deal with "bodies in spaaaace" by recycling them in a garden, specifically for human corpses. If you've got a colony in an environment with limited biomass, you probably want to hold onto everything organic. At least your remains can help make oxygen and pretty flowers for the still living.
- graycat 4y ago
  > Feel free to recycle me any way you want, I certainly won't care. In practice, you won't be recycled. Instead you will be frozen and just piled up or left in some orbit. Uh, it's cold out there. And to supply the energy for such recycling, sounds like some human colonization out there. Sorry, there won't be any such colonization. The health effects on humans of high energy cosmic rays and low gravity mean that colonization out there is just not reasonable, in realistic terms, colonization is just not possible. Some instruments and robots can be productive beyond low earth orbit. There's no reasonably feasible way humans can. In practice, the result of efforts to send humans beyond low earth orbit will be no gains and some collections of frozen dead bodies that will remain frozen for thousands of years. Bummer. Embarrassing.
  - kabdib 4y ago
    I agree with most of that. Charles Stross has a great essay on why space travel is horrible, and that robots are far, far better choices for almost any kind of mission. Hauling people around the universe is expensive, they're so fragile and needy. I mean, just look at the infrastructure it takes to keep them breathing. The SF novel I was thinking of was Niven and Pournelle's Footfall, where industrious aliens have solved all the hard problems of living for long periods in space, including keeping the lights on, getting rid of waste heat, and maintaining a stable ecosystem. They incorporate their dead into a ceremonial garden where they grow flowers or something. It is all very, very sketchy in practice, of course. Kim Stanley Robinson has a more realistic take in his book Aurora (and it's depressing, one of the few books of his I have no intention of re-reading). But I still don't think dead people in space are embarrassing. Or if they are, that it's a big deal. It's more of a problem with litter, like the tourists currently cluttering up the slopes of Mt Everest.
voldacar 4y ago
I can't tell if this is satire

Faaak 4y ago

How is having a dead citizen on Mars an embarrassment ? I'd have thought that it would be pride, even.

graycat 4y ago
How? The person is, uh, did I mention, dead? Since our intention was not to send people out there to die, their death indicates a failure, and that is an embarrassment. If anyone is a little slow to see the embarrassment, then I'm sure the US MSM (mainstream media) would use the deaths as a grand source of shocking headlines to grab people by the heart and gut, have their eyeballs follow, and increase the ad revenue. If you like the idea of dying out there, sign up to be one of the first humans on Mars: Your chances of staying there for thousands of years are excellent. And, for your death, I doubt that will take very long, maybe less than 100 hours after you land. That is, for humans, the moon and Mars are dangerous places, wildly, outrageously dangerous. For a death on the moon or Mars, sending the body back to earth would be expensive. Leaving the body there and adding it to the growing collection of dead bodies will be for thousands of years a grand embarrassment. For a body in space, often retrieving it would be very expensive, so expensive that we are in line to have a large, growing collection of bodies out in space in whatever orbits around whatever masses. In a little more detail, out there, humans will suffer from high energy radiation, i.e., cosmic rays, and the effects of low gravity. Further, both the physical and social environments will be highly foreign and, thus, very likely harmful. Yes, soon one proposal will be to gather up the bodies on the moon or Mars, load them into a special rocket, and send them to the sun. That will be an expensive rocket and still do nothing about the bodies in orbits. Let the Chinese, etc. accumulate dead bodies. We in the US will have just dead robots, right, that can be used for spare parts! Soooooo, here in the US, just take this opportunity to research, engineer, and develop various robots. We can learn our lesson the easy way (just read what I am writing here) or the hard way. But one way or the other, we are in line to learn our lesson: (A) Sending robots into space is quite doable. (B) Due to the dangers and the really goofy environments, there is no role for humans in deep space now or anytime on the horizon. Sooooo, the humans build the robots and send the robots, not the humans. The easy way or the hard way, guys.
- BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
  Following your argument to its logical conclusion, we should cease human activities on Earth too (otherwise, humans will die there - and we can't have that!).
  - graycat 4y ago
    Nope. Doesn't follow. Instead, we get to bury our dead, and they quickly decompose and can be forgotten about. In strong contrast, on the moon or Mars, burial would be wildly expensive, and the bodies would remain frozen and last for thousands of years. Shipping the bodies back to earth for burial or sending them to the sun, very expensive. In practice, we would just let the bodies pile up. That would be a massive embarrassment. Look, we're not in line to create societies with nice neighborhoods with couples, families, kids, etc. on the moon or Mars, in bubbles, tunnels, or anything. We're not in line to colonize them. Instead, our interests that are at all feasible will be science or military. For the science, we don't really want or need humans and their eyes, hands, or brains -- instead we need instruments, e.g., like we already have doing well on Mars. For what we can use from human eyes, hands, and brains, with some development, we can get that from robots. For the military, as we are now moving quickly just here on earth, even more so on the moon or Mars, we will want robots operating the rockets, weapons, etc. Besides, humans in the necessary bulky space suits are just not very effective at anything, not even just staying alive.
    - abduhl 4y ago
      Many bodies remain on or on the way to mountain summits like K2 and Everest. Retrieving them is prohibitively expensive. The conditions ensure that they will remain there in decomposed for centuries. Should we stop going into the mountains? It’s not an embarrassment to try to achieve an amazing task and fail. The embarrassment is giving up because you’re scared you’ll be embarrassed.
      - graycat 4y ago
        > K2 and Everest Sport for a few people. Otherwise no gain. > amazing task The moon and Mars, all pain, no gain. There is no gain, utility, worthwhile accomplishment for humans in space except for just a few humans in low earth orbit. There is nothing "amazing" that we know how to do sending humans beyond low earth orbit: Yes, we can build the rockets and put people on them, but there is essentially nothing they can do out there. Instruments, robots, yes. Humans, no. The US had some men walking on the moon. While they were there, they accomplished next to nothing. In simple terms, the whole effort was a publicity stunt for US presidential politics. And, all these decades later, no human has returned -- there is a big reason for that, there is no reason for a human up there. A human needs a space suit, huge, so clumsy the human can do next to nothing productive. Else the human needs a big, complicated space ship (station, bubble, tunnel) where, again, there is not much they can do, amazing or otherwise. Gee, they could take a lot of PDF files along and read about literature, science, ..., whatever. What we want out there is instruments. If we need more, would want humans to do, we should just develop suitable robots. Otherwise what we want out there is military, where again there is no real utility for having humans there. Humans just have no real role out there. Sorry 'bout that. Robots? Yes. Humans? No. Simple. If we send humans, the main result will be collections of frozen dead bodies that will still be there 1000 years from now. That will be a big embarrassment, and all for no good reason.

noselasd 4y ago

With that attitude, we'd all be sitting inside our houses and noone would do anything of interrest or importance.

graycat 4y ago
> sitting inside our houses No, but the attitude is staying inside the atmosphere of earth, usually on land, and at or close to sea level. That is what we evolved for, and we are effective there. Nearly anywhere else, we're talking super big, thick, heavy, clumsy suits and, still, lots of just outrageous dangers. > anything of interrest or importance. Dying on the moon or Mars is not of much of either. Instead, for the moon or Mars, we can get a lot of interesting and important work from research, engineering, and construction of robots able to do real work on the moon or Mars. For more work that is "interesting", and maybe "important", I'm busy at it everyday, without considering the moon or Mars. Actually, so far we've done pretty well with robots on Mars. For our next effort, we need a way to clean dust off the solar panels. Our robots have given us some really good data on the sun, Mercury and Venus, Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and its rings, each of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and now the boundary between our solar system and deeper space. The Japanese have done well with robots getting samples from some asteroids -- with some interesting data, e.g., where at least some of the amino acids could have come from. For something really interesting out there, how 'bout the results from a really big gravitational wave telescope? For humans? I'm just fine, close to sea level, on land, in a house, with an Internet connection, just fine right here, thank you. You are welcome to my slot on any rocket to the moon or Mars, very welcome!

bee_rider 4y ago

We have a ton of dead humans in the ocean, it isn't considered a national embarrassment, I don't think. Accidents are sad, but their inevitability is something that everyone understands. I don't think we should colonize Mars, at least given what we've seen there. Currently, it appears to be a big, empty, inhospitable, far away rock. Getting there and then terraforming it would, I guess, require figuring out how to live in space long term, at which point why bother going down the gravity well? Once we've figured out how to live in space... there's plenty of space in space, just stay in orbit (maybe we'll have expensive tourism on planets).

graycat 4y ago
> We have a ton of dead humans in the ocean, it isn't considered a national embarrassment, I don't think. Accidents are sad, but their inevitability is something that everyone understands. In practice, on the moon or Mars, the dead bodies would just pile up. And otherwise there would be a lot of them in long lasting orbits. Here on earth, we don't have that problem. E.g., using side scan sonar, we just found a US destroyer 3+ miles down, in two pieces, sunk by a shot from the battleship Yamato in one of the WWII battles in the Philippine Sea. We are not bothered by the pile up of the bodies of the dead US sailors. The bodies decompose and don't pile up, and in the case of the ocean are miles deep where it is pitch black, just above freezing, with not much in life. In my original post, I didn't object to the deaths. Instead I objected to the accumulation of dead bodies that will last for thousands of years. There is no reasonably feasible way for humans to colonize either the moon or Mars. Big problems include the medical effects of high energy cosmic rays and the low gravity. Other dangers stand to be the highly foreign, restrictive, threatening, and hostile environments, even nearly the best environments we could hope to create. Even if we could get some plants to be healthy on the moon or Mars, we can't get humans healthy there. No practical way. So, we will get piles of dead bodies, and all for nothing -- the moon and Mars are so hostile to humans that there is no way humans could be at all productive on either. Robots? Fine. Humans? No reasonably feasible way, and with a result of piles of dead bodies. Sorry 'bout that. It's not at all complicated.
- yellowapple 4y ago

kabdib 4y ago

People die all the time. It's a natural and (we are pretty sure) unavoidable side-effect of living. It might be awkward and untidy, but so is pooping. The universe makes no value judgements. It's not embarrassing, it's life. If I went to Mars and died, meh, no big deal. Sorry about the mess. Feel free to recycle me any way you want, I certainly won't care. I've read some science fiction where they deal with "bodies in spaaaace" by recycling them in a garden, specifically for human corpses. If you've got a colony in an environment with limited biomass, you probably want to hold onto everything organic. At least your remains can help make oxygen and pretty flowers for the still living.

graycat 4y ago
> Feel free to recycle me any way you want, I certainly won't care. In practice, you won't be recycled. Instead you will be frozen and just piled up or left in some orbit. Uh, it's cold out there. And to supply the energy for such recycling, sounds like some human colonization out there. Sorry, there won't be any such colonization. The health effects on humans of high energy cosmic rays and low gravity mean that colonization out there is just not reasonable, in realistic terms, colonization is just not possible. Some instruments and robots can be productive beyond low earth orbit. There's no reasonably feasible way humans can. In practice, the result of efforts to send humans beyond low earth orbit will be no gains and some collections of frozen dead bodies that will remain frozen for thousands of years. Bummer. Embarrassing.
- kabdib 4y ago
  I agree with most of that. Charles Stross has a great essay on why space travel is horrible, and that robots are far, far better choices for almost any kind of mission. Hauling people around the universe is expensive, they're so fragile and needy. I mean, just look at the infrastructure it takes to keep them breathing. The SF novel I was thinking of was Niven and Pournelle's Footfall, where industrious aliens have solved all the hard problems of living for long periods in space, including keeping the lights on, getting rid of waste heat, and maintaining a stable ecosystem. They incorporate their dead into a ceremonial garden where they grow flowers or something. It is all very, very sketchy in practice, of course. Kim Stanley Robinson has a more realistic take in his book Aurora (and it's depressing, one of the few books of his I have no intention of re-reading). But I still don't think dead people in space are embarrassing. Or if they are, that it's a big deal. It's more of a problem with litter, like the tourists currently cluttering up the slopes of Mt Everest.

voldacar 4y ago

I can't tell if this is satire