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Ask HN: Why not use androids to colonize Mars initially and then humans later?
Wouldn't that be safer and perhaps even faster, as humans would arrive at Mars with a city already built by androids?
- talldayo 2y agoWhy use androids at all? Bipedal robots are accident prone and difficult to repair. A wealth of effort would be wasted housing and maintaining a transient race of robo-people that would one day be obsoleted to make room for humans. Even then, it's doubtful how effective the anthropoidal form is on a body of mass with 38% of Earth's gravity. You might prefer other options. When you weigh the risks involved with sending robots that have a limited motor manipulation, range of motion and independent ingenuity, you might as well just spend a few bajillion dollars sending an astronaut do it. You can very feasibly sustain a small population of people on life support, and if they were aided by additive manufacturing tools that could leverage Mars' natural resources then I'd consider that a much more realistic colony moonshot.
- RGamma 2y agoOr why not allocate those bajillions to fix our own planet's problems first?
- okasaki 2y agoBecause Androids don't exist?
- amichail 2y agoThey are already being developed at Tesla.
- talldayo 2y agoHumans are ready now, and already fill the operational requirements without the famous "Elon truth stretching" maneuver that we've all become so intimately familiar with.
- gregjor 2y agoYou mistake a few faked demos of remote-controlled mannequins for actual working android robots. The point of the Tesla robots comes down to pumping the stock, not colonizing Mars. Watch videos of state of the art actual robots and try to draw a line from their actual abilities to building a city. On Mars. In an environment with no infrastructure, no people to repair them. Pure sci-fi fantasy at this point.
- timeon 2y ago> as humans would arrive at Mars Why would humans go there in person?
- WheelsAtLarge 2y agoMars colonization is still a distant goal. With so much of the world unexplored, it's hard to imagine humans living on Mars in our lifetimes. But it makes sense to use robots to pave the way. Japan is already using robots to help with the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Who knows, maybe one day we'll see androids on Mars.
- gregjor 2y agoHumans will not go to Mars and live in cities built by androids. All of that is fantasy and hype. If we had the technology required to colonize Mars, or even the moon, we could fix the problems we've created on this planet. We could colonize the oceans. We cant't "terraform" anything, we don't have androids that can build anything, we don't have a plan for getting lots of people to Mars, or keeping them alive. That's all fantasy and self-serving stock pumping.
- CRConrad 2y ago> Why not use androids to colonize Mars...? Because the closest thing humankind has come to a working android is the (often somewhat glitchy) OS on most of the world's phones.