> Cremation, burial, they sound like you are assuming some colonization. You don't need a full-blown colony for either of those. You just need a furnace or a

> Cremation, burial, they sound like you are assuming some colonization. You don't need a full-blown colony for either of those. You just need a furnace or a shovel, respectively. > Well, there won't be any colonization -- humans just can't hope to be in space very long without serious harm from low gravity and high energy cosmic rays. We don't really know that; our only datapoints for long-term habitation are "Earth's surface" and "microgravity in low-Earth orbit". There's a pretty wide range of conditions in between that, and plenty of possibilities for mitigating both; that's indeed one of NASA's objectives in resuming manned lunar missions: to evaluate long-term habitation and actually collect that missing data. > Solution: As in the current Mars robots, have some clear scientific objectives, develop some good instruments, and fire the rockets. Develop the robots along with the instruments so that it will be easy for the robots to work with the instruments. If we can have self-driving cars on some city streets, then we should be able to develop some robots effective in space. That's what we already do, and it severely restricts the quantity and quality of science that's able to be done. It's a stopgap until we're actually able to get "boots on the ground".