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> The only way to explore Mars in our lifetime is to ditch the requirement that people accompany the machinery. It just doesn't make sense to me to send humans

by rhcom2 2y ago

> The only way to explore Mars in our lifetime is to ditch the requirement that people accompany the machinery. It just doesn't make sense to me to send humans. Exhaust the science collection of robots first.

keiferski 2y ago
The budget and general public interest will be 1000x greater if humans are sent. “Robots explore Mars” is a daily news highlight. “First humans land on Mars” is a global historical event.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  General public interest will vanish once people realize that the journey will last two years and likely start 30 years from now. Oh, and they won't see the event live anywways. The trip to the Moon was a free trip to Jurassic Park in comparison.
oceanplexian 2y ago
If that's the case then what is the point? If you think robots should do everything then you might as well retire the human race. Why even bother to live. Why explore the stars when you can get a robot to do it for you?
- 0_____0 2y ago
  If the goal is "put man on Mars" then that's what you gotta do. It's harder to make the argument that you need to do that in the service of science, or even offworld colonies, given the unsuitability and impracticality of those both.
  - lmm 2y ago
    What plausible path is there to offworld colonies without sending humans?
    - whiplash451 2y ago
      If the end game is offworld colonies, then we should craft the whole adventure as a series of one-way trips, not two-way trips. That's a serious paradigm shift compared to what this (excellent) article describes.
      - Ekaros 2y ago
        For me first logical step is to ignore the getting there part. And prove that we can actually build colony here. In suitable location say for example Sahara or Antarctica. After those technological challenges are solved next step is to see how to get it to orbit or make same in orbit. And then we can start thinking how to get all the stuff over there.
        whiplash451 2y ago
        I agree. That was the sense of my comment too.
      - somenameforme 2y ago
        Colonies on Mars are what drove the founding of SpaceX. Elon was looking up NASA's plans about sending humans to Mars and found that they simply didn't exist. He wanted to send a greenhouse to Mars while streaming its growth to get people inspired and thinking big again. NASA wasn't interested, Russia wanted too much $$$, so SpaceX was born. A colony doesn't mean you live there forever - it simply means a permanent human establishment. Some people will want to go back to Earth, some will want to stay on Mars indefinitely. This is a big part of their obsession with lowering costs to space. When the launch costs are not such a huge economic factor, you have much greater leverage with doing things like building, resupplying, or even engaging in interplanetary commerce.
        whiplash451 2y ago
        My understanding is that what drove the founding of SpaceX was a promise for more efficient use of agencies' money in space programs. Going to Mars may have been part of the story, but I doubt that it was a strong component of the decision making in the end.
hagbard_c 2y ago
Yes, well, maybe logically speaking that would be true. Practically speaking hardly anyone blinks an eye when 'society' daily sends young (mostly) men into harm's way whether that be by employing them in known dangerous professions such as logging (etc.) or by sending them to war. According to the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, more than 526,000 people die each year because of the violence associated with armed conflict and large- and small-scale criminality [1] while the world just keeps on turning. Nobody would even blink an eye if that number changed to 525.000 per year by putting dangerous criminals behind bars and keeping them there or by eradicating some terrorist group somewhere nor would they loose sleep if it changed to 527.000 per year after some conflict somewhere flared up again. Life is not as precious as it is often thought to be by most of us here on this site. Seen in that light it makes a lot of sense to choose 1000 volunteers out of the millions who would show up if asked to go on a mission to Mars, success not at all guaranteed and quite likely to be a one-way trip for the foreseeable future. Mars has been explored by a multitude of probes and rovers so sending the next one, no matter how advanced, will not cause much of a stir. Sending 1000 people to Mars with the intent of establishing an outpost will 'rock the world'. If successful (which is not at all a given) it would be one of the greatest achievements of our species while a successful robot mission would just be another tick on the list. [1] https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/world-development-indicators/series/VC.BTL.DETH https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/world-develo...
- knome 2y ago
  >Life is not as precious as it is often thought to be by most of us here on this site starting anything by throwing out the value human life seems like a bad direction.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    I think the person you're responding to had a solid point, but he derailed it with his own examples. It's not about "throwing out the value of human life" but appreciating that risk is something that, in many endeavors, is going to remain relatively high even if you make every effort to minimize it. When we went to the Moon, the obituary for the astronauts was written before they even took off. And the astronauts themselves felt they had somewhere from a 50% to 70% chance of success. Everybody was well aware of the extreme risks, but they still voluntarily participated, because they felt the achievement was worth the risk. And indeed those brave men inspired an entire generation to science and achieved what many believe was still the greatest achievement in humanity's entire history. The first missions to Mars will always be high risk, because the fundamental issue is that you're always going to be doing a bunch of things that no other human ever has. There's just so many unknown unknowns there that we're going end up getting surprised by something. So all we can do is make sure we have highly capable people and try to prepare as well as we can. But in the end, even when you work to minimize risk as much as you possibly can, that mission will always qualify as 'risky.'
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
somenameforme 2y ago
I think people are more enthusiastic about robots than justifiable, because they see things like the Atlas robot and imagine that's the future. In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes, or in all probability would in 50 more. The fundamental problem is that moving parts break. This results in things like rovers being exceptionally conservative in both their design and behavior, out of necessity. For instance Curiosity's drill can only drill to about 6cm, and even then it broke after 7 limited activations, which then took a team of scientists 2 years to come up with a partially effective workaround. A guy on the scene could have fixed it a few minutes, or done just as effective 'drilling' himself with a spoon. We're literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer. Another issue is in mobility. That involves lots of moving parts. So Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h) meaning at its average speed it'd take about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area. So you want human feedback on a ~40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. And as might be expected its tires have also, broken. So it's contemporary travel time would be even worse. Imagine trying to dig into all the secrets of Earth by traveling around at 1 mile per year, and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm. And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future. ---------- Beyond all of this, manned spaceflight is inspiring, extremely inspiring. Putting a man on the Moon inspired an entire generation to science and achievement. The same will be true with the first man on Mars. NASA tried to tap into this with their helicopter drone on Mars but people just don't really care about rovers, drones, and probes. It'd be nice to live in a world where kids don't aspire to be friggin streamers when they grow up.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- varjag 2y ago
  In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes We can't be so sure. The probes have discovered that Mars has no channels and vegetation. That water is uncommon (then discovered that it is still there in some quantity). They found out precise atmospheric composition, mapped out all major surface features, observed the climate over decades. They discovered perchlorate toxicity of the soil for humans, something that would have been a nasty surprise to a manned crew. Am not opposed to Mars expeditions in principle, it's an exciting thought. But I just can't see humans contributing all that much on the odd few landings, with a high chance of contaminating whatever traces of life there could be.
thaumaturgy 2y ago
Humans are extraordinary machines. We are self-healing, regenerating, low-power, versatile, autonomous, and most of us have a pretty decent array of sensors built-in, along with some communications equipment that's capable of interpreting the signals from our sensors and transmitting that information to other humans in a remarkable variety of ways. All of these are approximate and relative of course, if someone replies with e.g., "but actually we're not as low power as...", it will be easy to ignore. Specialized machines can do things humans can't, of course. No single human could have survived as long in the Martian environment as any of the rovers have. But nobody has yet designed a machine that can do all the things humans can do. Take the single problem of mobility: many very smart engineers have worked together to develop a set of wheels that can usually move the rovers around their environment without getting stuck or damaged, or at least have a chance of getting unstuck. A human that hasn't climbed a set of stairs in a decade can still outpace the rovers, and do so over more varied terrain, and with less chance of getting stuck. So, yes, from an engineering point of view, building new robots that can do things and shipping them to Mars to do those things presents a lot of very interesting technical challenges to solve. It's all endless puzzles and little unsung feats of science and engineering -- assuming there is a country left with both the will and the resources and the talent to pursue such things. But from a human exploration perspective -- our instinctive drive, or compulsion, or whatever it is, that has spread our species across the entire planet -- no machine will ever quite satisfy the desire to have that experience with the sensors we were born with. My enthusiasm for a human mission to Mars has waned quite a bit in the last few years, largely owing to its most vocal advocate. Still, all the same, I think we should acknowledge that robots are poor substitutes for geologists.
- glenstein 2y ago
  I can certainly agree that humans, regarded as perfected creatures of biological engineering, would make for an extraordinary Mars rover. You can make the case that we even the best among all animals for that job here on Earth (we are that good, a fascinating convo for another thread). The trouble is space itself is really rough in new and different ways. Even if everything is going right, the radiation is extremely dangerous, both on the journey and on Mars itself. And there's bone decalcification which happens very fast. And life support systems issues become very quickly entangled with all the other engineering issues that can cause cascading failures between systems, so even if you didn't think of (say) engineering failures of how power gets to some component as a life support issue, it can become one due to the interdependence of systems.
njarboe 2y ago
It doesn't make sense to send humans except many humans want to go. Those humans are working on the project to go to Mars, not send robots to Mars. We can do both of course. I would like people to start a civilization on Mars. I would like to go to Mars. I will pay for the privilege to do so or see it happen for othera. Maybe it will. There are many people like me.
schiffern 2y ago
In the spirit of xkcd 1232[1]... What's the timeline on "exhausting all the science collection abilities of robots?" Ten years? Fifteen? There are a lot of potential future robot abilities... [1] https://xkcd.com/1232/ https://xkcd.com/1232/
asadotzler 2y ago
We should never have sent humans to Antarctica. We should have relied on binoculars from ships and maybe some blimps with cameras, right? I mean, what can a human possibly accomplish that a machine can't. Also, we didn't "send" them, the early explorers and bases were done by people who wanted to go and do research there. We have lots of people who want to go to Mars to do research or who want very much to benefit from the research humans can do better on Mars than current robots.

by rhcom2 2y ago

keiferski 2y ago

The budget and general public interest will be 1000x greater if humans are sent. “Robots explore Mars” is a daily news highlight. “First humans land on Mars” is a global historical event.

whiplash451 2y ago
General public interest will vanish once people realize that the journey will last two years and likely start 30 years from now. Oh, and they won't see the event live anywways. The trip to the Moon was a free trip to Jurassic Park in comparison.

oceanplexian 2y ago

If that's the case then what is the point? If you think robots should do everything then you might as well retire the human race. Why even bother to live. Why explore the stars when you can get a robot to do it for you?

0_____0 2y ago
If the goal is "put man on Mars" then that's what you gotta do. It's harder to make the argument that you need to do that in the service of science, or even offworld colonies, given the unsuitability and impracticality of those both.
- lmm 2y ago
  What plausible path is there to offworld colonies without sending humans?
  - whiplash451 2y ago
    If the end game is offworld colonies, then we should craft the whole adventure as a series of one-way trips, not two-way trips. That's a serious paradigm shift compared to what this (excellent) article describes.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      For me first logical step is to ignore the getting there part. And prove that we can actually build colony here. In suitable location say for example Sahara or Antarctica. After those technological challenges are solved next step is to see how to get it to orbit or make same in orbit. And then we can start thinking how to get all the stuff over there.
      - whiplash451 2y ago
        I agree. That was the sense of my comment too.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      Colonies on Mars are what drove the founding of SpaceX. Elon was looking up NASA's plans about sending humans to Mars and found that they simply didn't exist. He wanted to send a greenhouse to Mars while streaming its growth to get people inspired and thinking big again. NASA wasn't interested, Russia wanted too much $$$, so SpaceX was born. A colony doesn't mean you live there forever - it simply means a permanent human establishment. Some people will want to go back to Earth, some will want to stay on Mars indefinitely. This is a big part of their obsession with lowering costs to space. When the launch costs are not such a huge economic factor, you have much greater leverage with doing things like building, resupplying, or even engaging in interplanetary commerce.
      - whiplash451 2y ago
        My understanding is that what drove the founding of SpaceX was a promise for more efficient use of agencies' money in space programs. Going to Mars may have been part of the story, but I doubt that it was a strong component of the decision making in the end.

hagbard_c 2y ago

Yes, well, maybe logically speaking that would be true. Practically speaking hardly anyone blinks an eye when 'society' daily sends young (mostly) men into harm's way whether that be by employing them in known dangerous professions such as logging (etc.) or by sending them to war. According to the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, more than 526,000 people die each year because of the violence associated with armed conflict and large- and small-scale criminality [1] while the world just keeps on turning. Nobody would even blink an eye if that number changed to 525.000 per year by putting dangerous criminals behind bars and keeping them there or by eradicating some terrorist group somewhere nor would they loose sleep if it changed to 527.000 per year after some conflict somewhere flared up again. Life is not as precious as it is often thought to be by most of us here on this site. Seen in that light it makes a lot of sense to choose 1000 volunteers out of the millions who would show up if asked to go on a mission to Mars, success not at all guaranteed and quite likely to be a one-way trip for the foreseeable future. Mars has been explored by a multitude of probes and rovers so sending the next one, no matter how advanced, will not cause much of a stir. Sending 1000 people to Mars with the intent of establishing an outpost will 'rock the world'. If successful (which is not at all a given) it would be one of the greatest achievements of our species while a successful robot mission would just be another tick on the list. [1] https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/world-development-indicators/series/VC.BTL.DETH https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/world-develo...

knome 2y ago
>Life is not as precious as it is often thought to be by most of us here on this site starting anything by throwing out the value human life seems like a bad direction.
- somenameforme 2y ago
  I think the person you're responding to had a solid point, but he derailed it with his own examples. It's not about "throwing out the value of human life" but appreciating that risk is something that, in many endeavors, is going to remain relatively high even if you make every effort to minimize it. When we went to the Moon, the obituary for the astronauts was written before they even took off. And the astronauts themselves felt they had somewhere from a 50% to 70% chance of success. Everybody was well aware of the extreme risks, but they still voluntarily participated, because they felt the achievement was worth the risk. And indeed those brave men inspired an entire generation to science and achieved what many believe was still the greatest achievement in humanity's entire history. The first missions to Mars will always be high risk, because the fundamental issue is that you're always going to be doing a bunch of things that no other human ever has. There's just so many unknown unknowns there that we're going end up getting surprised by something. So all we can do is make sure we have highly capable people and try to prepare as well as we can. But in the end, even when you work to minimize risk as much as you possibly can, that mission will always qualify as 'risky.'

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

somenameforme 2y ago

I think people are more enthusiastic about robots than justifiable, because they see things like the Atlas robot and imagine that's the future. In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes, or in all probability would in 50 more. The fundamental problem is that moving parts break. This results in things like rovers being exceptionally conservative in both their design and behavior, out of necessity. For instance Curiosity's drill can only drill to about 6cm, and even then it broke after 7 limited activations, which then took a team of scientists 2 years to come up with a partially effective workaround. A guy on the scene could have fixed it a few minutes, or done just as effective 'drilling' himself with a spoon. We're literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer. Another issue is in mobility. That involves lots of moving parts. So Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h) meaning at its average speed it'd take about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area. So you want human feedback on a ~40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. And as might be expected its tires have also, broken. So it's contemporary travel time would be even worse. Imagine trying to dig into all the secrets of Earth by traveling around at 1 mile per year, and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm. And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future. ---------- Beyond all of this, manned spaceflight is inspiring, extremely inspiring. Putting a man on the Moon inspired an entire generation to science and achievement. The same will be true with the first man on Mars. NASA tried to tap into this with their helicopter drone on Mars but people just don't really care about rovers, drones, and probes. It'd be nice to live in a world where kids don't aspire to be friggin streamers when they grow up.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
varjag 2y ago
In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes We can't be so sure. The probes have discovered that Mars has no channels and vegetation. That water is uncommon (then discovered that it is still there in some quantity). They found out precise atmospheric composition, mapped out all major surface features, observed the climate over decades. They discovered perchlorate toxicity of the soil for humans, something that would have been a nasty surprise to a manned crew. Am not opposed to Mars expeditions in principle, it's an exciting thought. But I just can't see humans contributing all that much on the odd few landings, with a high chance of contaminating whatever traces of life there could be.

thaumaturgy 2y ago

Humans are extraordinary machines. We are self-healing, regenerating, low-power, versatile, autonomous, and most of us have a pretty decent array of sensors built-in, along with some communications equipment that's capable of interpreting the signals from our sensors and transmitting that information to other humans in a remarkable variety of ways. All of these are approximate and relative of course, if someone replies with e.g., "but actually we're not as low power as...", it will be easy to ignore. Specialized machines can do things humans can't, of course. No single human could have survived as long in the Martian environment as any of the rovers have. But nobody has yet designed a machine that can do all the things humans can do. Take the single problem of mobility: many very smart engineers have worked together to develop a set of wheels that can usually move the rovers around their environment without getting stuck or damaged, or at least have a chance of getting unstuck. A human that hasn't climbed a set of stairs in a decade can still outpace the rovers, and do so over more varied terrain, and with less chance of getting stuck. So, yes, from an engineering point of view, building new robots that can do things and shipping them to Mars to do those things presents a lot of very interesting technical challenges to solve. It's all endless puzzles and little unsung feats of science and engineering -- assuming there is a country left with both the will and the resources and the talent to pursue such things. But from a human exploration perspective -- our instinctive drive, or compulsion, or whatever it is, that has spread our species across the entire planet -- no machine will ever quite satisfy the desire to have that experience with the sensors we were born with. My enthusiasm for a human mission to Mars has waned quite a bit in the last few years, largely owing to its most vocal advocate. Still, all the same, I think we should acknowledge that robots are poor substitutes for geologists.

glenstein 2y ago
I can certainly agree that humans, regarded as perfected creatures of biological engineering, would make for an extraordinary Mars rover. You can make the case that we even the best among all animals for that job here on Earth (we are that good, a fascinating convo for another thread). The trouble is space itself is really rough in new and different ways. Even if everything is going right, the radiation is extremely dangerous, both on the journey and on Mars itself. And there's bone decalcification which happens very fast. And life support systems issues become very quickly entangled with all the other engineering issues that can cause cascading failures between systems, so even if you didn't think of (say) engineering failures of how power gets to some component as a life support issue, it can become one due to the interdependence of systems.

njarboe 2y ago

It doesn't make sense to send humans except many humans want to go. Those humans are working on the project to go to Mars, not send robots to Mars. We can do both of course. I would like people to start a civilization on Mars. I would like to go to Mars. I will pay for the privilege to do so or see it happen for othera. Maybe it will. There are many people like me.

schiffern 2y ago

In the spirit of xkcd 1232[1]... What's the timeline on "exhausting all the science collection abilities of robots?" Ten years? Fifteen? There are a lot of potential future robot abilities... [1] https://xkcd.com/1232/ https://xkcd.com/1232/

asadotzler 2y ago

We should never have sent humans to Antarctica. We should have relied on binoculars from ships and maybe some blimps with cameras, right? I mean, what can a human possibly accomplish that a machine can't. Also, we didn't "send" them, the early explorers and bases were done by people who wanted to go and do research there. We have lots of people who want to go to Mars to do research or who want very much to benefit from the research humans can do better on Mars than current robots.