7 ms·

To everyone who asks questions like, "Why send people when robots are better/cheaper" and "Isn't it too dangerous", I would reply, "Stay here". It is only a re

by geuis 14y ago

To everyone who asks questions like, "Why send people when robots are better/cheaper" and "Isn't it too dangerous", I would reply, "Stay here". It is only a recent phenomenon in human history, in the last few hundred years, that all the places in the world are known. For hundreds of thousands of years, there have always been new lands and oceans for our kind to explore. Indeed, until the last ~20k years, we all existed in a near constant wandering state. Thats how we survived, and the lifestyle is still practiced today, albeit only in very tiny numbers in remote places. Even with civilized life, i.e. villages, towns, and cities, for thousands of years people have jumped on ships or made years-long treks across oceans and continents to build new lives. Some of this was the desire to be free, or it was forced, or it was from desperation, or it was simply to explore. Simply because we almost all live in a vastly interconnected world now doesn't mean that any of those reasons have disappeared, or that the kinds of people willing to take such risks have died out. We're still here, if latent, amongst the masses. Many of us spend our youth traveling the world, climbing the next mountain. Many others lose themselves in vast game worlds where we can, for short times, satisfy the need to explore and build new lives. Some games such as WoW, Eve Online, Secondlife, and Civilization are so popular in part of because of these desires and needs. So when you ask, "Why?", I say "Why not?". You are free to stay here. I want to go see what's out there.

StavrosK 14y ago
"Okay, but I'm not paying for it."
- Goronmon 14y ago
  Assuming you're referencing things like this being funded by taxes, that's not really how it works.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  If everyone were always given the option to decide not to pay for things, what do you think the current state of society would be?
Cushman 14y ago
For me, at least, it's only a small part of a greater question: Why do anything that robots do better and cheaper? It seems to me that the best thing for us as a species is to let robots that do the things robots are good at, like translating in physical space, moving objects, manipulating matter, et cetera, and let humans spend their time doing the things that humans are good at: art, culture, coming up with novel behaviors for robots. You get excited about exploration-- that's great. I get excited about post-scarcity. Because that will mean that everyone gets to do what they're excited about.
- joshuahedlund 14y ago
  I guess I feel that space is so huge and has so much stuff in it that any progress in exploring it brings us closer to post-scarcity, whether it's humans or robots or both. Humans on Mars will always be able to respond to things much faster than humans on Earth monitoring robots on Mars, for one.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  No matter how hard they try you can't live on Mars via a robot. Ultimately it's about adventure, experience, and colonization. Robots are great for science, but there's more to space exploration than just science. Edit: There will come a time in the near future, probably by 2050 but certainly before 2100, when the idea of "space" evaporates away. Space is just a place. Mars is just a place. It's just as much a place as the street right outside your doorway or the grocery store just down the road. It's a place we can visit, experience, and a place where we can live. Once people start living off of Earth I think that artificial barrier will come down and people will begin accepting the idea that the Earth is just a part of the Universe. We have come to split up the Universe into two parts: the Earth, and everywhere else. But this is a false dichotomy due only to the particulars of history, there is only one Universe.
  - JackpotDen 14y ago
    They said that last century. We put a man on the moon. We haven't been back in decades, at least thirty years. The USSR planned on sending a man to mars to live, and die there. It was feasible during the cold war, and we still haven't done anything about it.
dinkumthinkum 14y ago
I'm not saying we should or shouldn't go. I'm just responding the comparison that this is just like the early explorers. I don't think that is a proper comparison. The early explorers didn't have to contend with vastly different atmosphere's. Life in the New World was much like the old, with negligible differences compared to what awaits on Mars. The expense is also much, much more. Nevertheless, I think travel to Mars is an inevitability but I think it represents a much deeper and dangerous proposition than what the early explorers had to face.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  If anything I'd say exploring Mars is easier today than early exploration was. In either case it's necessary for people to rely on technology in order to survive. In one case it's the technology of pressure hulls, electronics, CO2 scrubbers, and so on. In the other case it's the technology of boats, preserved food, hunting, weapons, etc. But as a practical matter we know that the latter technologies often failed and people died. I think it's easy to forget just how massively daring a lot of exploration in human history has been. We know that stone age peoples who had only just recently developed the rudiments of agriculture traveled through Europe and Asia to set up colonies. Imagine what it must have been like to take your tiny stock of seeds and tools and maybe one or two families and trek through primordial forest and travel hundreds of miles before choosing to settle down. Or think about the later bouts of colonization during the bronze age. Folks in tiny boats without maps or compasses sailing across oceans (the South Pacific) or the Mediterranean and colonizing far away lands. The city of Marseilles was founded as a trading post by greeks from the coast of Turkey, 2600 years ago. That's a journey of about 2,000 miles by boat. And then imagine what it was like to explore new territory, set up lonely habitations of only a handful of humans many days walk away from any neighbors and to live in fear of bears, packs of wolves, and the violence of fellow humans. Four thousand years ago early bronze age tribes in southeast Asia set out and colonized Indonesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar. And they did it using nothing more than outrigger canoes with crude sails. In comparison, colonizing Mars with all of our modern technology is easy mode.
  - geuis 14y ago
jaaron 14y ago
Seeing just how risky the Curiosity landing was reminded me just how far away we are from landing on Mars. I now seriously doubt I'll see such a landing in the next 30-50 years. And with respect to "we've already explored this planet, let's go to Mars" I'd offer the following: let's see someone successfully colonize the bottom of the ocean or antartica and then I'll believe we're ready to colonize Mars.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Operations in space tend to follow a pretty strict tradeoff between mass and complexity. The more mass you can throw at the problem the less complex the solutions you can come up with. In the case of the Curiosity rover the mass was constrained by the launch vehicle used (Atlas V 541) and they wanted to maximize the amount of payload dedicated to the rover systems, which resulted in the complex landing scheme. With a manned landing the system would be a lot more massive and generally far more straightforward. With respect to the idea that we should colonize the bottom of the ocean first I'd say: why do we have to do only one or the other?
- freehunter 14y ago
  Landing the same rover using the same process on the moon would have been almost as difficult. The difficulty being in the skycrane assembly and not having the option of manual control. A manned mission would be landed more similarly to landing the Eagle on the moon, and would have the option of realtime manual landing. It wouldn't take 14 minutes for the crew to find out if it landed safely or not.
  - timdiggerm 14y ago
    That's true, but don't forget that the skycrane was necessary because it's Mars. The atmosphere is thick enough to be a problem, but thin enough that you can't just use parachutes, and the gravity is high enough that only lightweight things can use airbags. Skycrane seems great...but even it is not good for something as heavy as a manned landing. We don't have a good way to land humans on Mars.
thangalin 14y ago
Humans have no backup. Our curiosity aside, having an extra-terrestrial colony is an excellent reason to visit Mars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
- pyoung 14y ago
  Although I would argue that Mars is a poor choice for a backup. It is fairly inhospitable and relatively close to earth. I think generation ships would be a better investment if this is our goal. Although Mars would be a good stepping stone.
  - thangalin 14y ago
    How would a space vessel be more hospitable than a planet with water, a partial atmosphere, caverns below solid rock, a small magnetosheath, and 62% of Earth's gravity? *Edit: Instead of sending tonnes of metal into Earth's orbit from Earth, would it be more efficient to set up shop on Mars? Mine Mars and build space vessels in Martian orbit. Launching materials into Martian orbit should be relatively trivial compared with Earth.
    - pyoung 14y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship The end goal of the generation ship would be to colonize a planet in a far flung solar system. I would imagine that with the number of planets in existence, we could find one that was more hospitable than mars. This would also provide a more robust 'backup' for our species, in the case that the extinction event was solar system wide. Once again, I think Mars is a good stepping stone (for reasons that you mention), but I also imagine that a lot of the technology that would allow us to establish a sustainable colony on Mars would also allow us to develop robust generation ships.
jksmith 14y ago
Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh pitching to bankers in the movie "Spirit of St Louis:" "We have to know...We have to try."
Florin_Andrei 14y ago
Exactly. Same argument applies for life extension, or any other radical change like that. Nobody forces you to follow in the wake of the pioneers. You can always just stay behind.
- geuis 14y ago
  You got it perfectly. I want to go for the experience and opportunity. But I also want to build something for the future. No one remembers the people that stay behind and live out their lives, but the names and deeds of the founders of Pensacola, St. Augustine, and Jamestown are taught and remembered. Another reason to settle other places in the solar system is that we can do so without guilt. In America, we have remember the atrocities commited during the building of the USA. On Mars, the moon, and anywhere else it's all fresh and no one is there. I don't have my own family yet, so the idea of literally building a new world where my kids and grandkids grow and thrive has a strong attraction too. Maybe they would hate that they were born on Mars with little or no chance of returning to Earth, but I have to hope that they see it as their world and their future.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    When I went to sleep after the Curiosity landing, I had a dream that I was on Mars with a group of colonists. I "overheard" someone say "this is the first child born outside of Earth". Imagining someone who is a citizen (by virtue of their parents) of a country they've never seen, on a planet they've never visited... I woke up in wonderment that this is going to happen some day. I hope I'm around to see it.
    - geuis 14y ago
      I hope it's your kid or mine. That's a great, great dream.
  - kayoone 14y ago
    Born on Mars? Come on, we MIGHT be able to put a man on the Mars in 15 years, colonizing it so that your kids can be born there is far away.
colanderman 14y ago
Your argument is illogical. From "exploration is desirable" you conclude "humans should explore"; but this doesn't refute "humans should explore using robots as sensory extensions" like you imply in your first paragraph.
joshlegs 14y ago
I would also point out that when people did first start exploring our own world, it was fraught with peril. Many died as they settled new areas and explored. So, obviously we see what happened as we explored our own world and some of the benefits it has reaped (opening up new resources, etc.). So why WOULDN'T we want to explore other worlds?

by geuis 14y ago

StavrosK 14y ago

"Okay, but I'm not paying for it."

Goronmon 14y ago
Assuming you're referencing things like this being funded by taxes, that's not really how it works.
jlgreco 14y ago
If everyone were always given the option to decide not to pay for things, what do you think the current state of society would be?

Cushman 14y ago

For me, at least, it's only a small part of a greater question: Why do anything that robots do better and cheaper? It seems to me that the best thing for us as a species is to let robots that do the things robots are good at, like translating in physical space, moving objects, manipulating matter, et cetera, and let humans spend their time doing the things that humans are good at: art, culture, coming up with novel behaviors for robots. You get excited about exploration-- that's great. I get excited about post-scarcity. Because that will mean that everyone gets to do what they're excited about.

joshuahedlund 14y ago
I guess I feel that space is so huge and has so much stuff in it that any progress in exploring it brings us closer to post-scarcity, whether it's humans or robots or both. Humans on Mars will always be able to respond to things much faster than humans on Earth monitoring robots on Mars, for one.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
No matter how hard they try you can't live on Mars via a robot. Ultimately it's about adventure, experience, and colonization. Robots are great for science, but there's more to space exploration than just science. Edit: There will come a time in the near future, probably by 2050 but certainly before 2100, when the idea of "space" evaporates away. Space is just a place. Mars is just a place. It's just as much a place as the street right outside your doorway or the grocery store just down the road. It's a place we can visit, experience, and a place where we can live. Once people start living off of Earth I think that artificial barrier will come down and people will begin accepting the idea that the Earth is just a part of the Universe. We have come to split up the Universe into two parts: the Earth, and everywhere else. But this is a false dichotomy due only to the particulars of history, there is only one Universe.
- JackpotDen 14y ago
  They said that last century. We put a man on the moon. We haven't been back in decades, at least thirty years. The USSR planned on sending a man to mars to live, and die there. It was feasible during the cold war, and we still haven't done anything about it.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago

I'm not saying we should or shouldn't go. I'm just responding the comparison that this is just like the early explorers. I don't think that is a proper comparison. The early explorers didn't have to contend with vastly different atmosphere's. Life in the New World was much like the old, with negligible differences compared to what awaits on Mars. The expense is also much, much more. Nevertheless, I think travel to Mars is an inevitability but I think it represents a much deeper and dangerous proposition than what the early explorers had to face.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
If anything I'd say exploring Mars is easier today than early exploration was. In either case it's necessary for people to rely on technology in order to survive. In one case it's the technology of pressure hulls, electronics, CO2 scrubbers, and so on. In the other case it's the technology of boats, preserved food, hunting, weapons, etc. But as a practical matter we know that the latter technologies often failed and people died. I think it's easy to forget just how massively daring a lot of exploration in human history has been. We know that stone age peoples who had only just recently developed the rudiments of agriculture traveled through Europe and Asia to set up colonies. Imagine what it must have been like to take your tiny stock of seeds and tools and maybe one or two families and trek through primordial forest and travel hundreds of miles before choosing to settle down. Or think about the later bouts of colonization during the bronze age. Folks in tiny boats without maps or compasses sailing across oceans (the South Pacific) or the Mediterranean and colonizing far away lands. The city of Marseilles was founded as a trading post by greeks from the coast of Turkey, 2600 years ago. That's a journey of about 2,000 miles by boat. And then imagine what it was like to explore new territory, set up lonely habitations of only a handful of humans many days walk away from any neighbors and to live in fear of bears, packs of wolves, and the violence of fellow humans. Four thousand years ago early bronze age tribes in southeast Asia set out and colonized Indonesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar. And they did it using nothing more than outrigger canoes with crude sails. In comparison, colonizing Mars with all of our modern technology is easy mode.
- geuis 14y ago

jaaron 14y ago

Seeing just how risky the Curiosity landing was reminded me just how far away we are from landing on Mars. I now seriously doubt I'll see such a landing in the next 30-50 years. And with respect to "we've already explored this planet, let's go to Mars" I'd offer the following: let's see someone successfully colonize the bottom of the ocean or antartica and then I'll believe we're ready to colonize Mars.

InclinedPlane 14y ago
Operations in space tend to follow a pretty strict tradeoff between mass and complexity. The more mass you can throw at the problem the less complex the solutions you can come up with. In the case of the Curiosity rover the mass was constrained by the launch vehicle used (Atlas V 541) and they wanted to maximize the amount of payload dedicated to the rover systems, which resulted in the complex landing scheme. With a manned landing the system would be a lot more massive and generally far more straightforward. With respect to the idea that we should colonize the bottom of the ocean first I'd say: why do we have to do only one or the other?
freehunter 14y ago
Landing the same rover using the same process on the moon would have been almost as difficult. The difficulty being in the skycrane assembly and not having the option of manual control. A manned mission would be landed more similarly to landing the Eagle on the moon, and would have the option of realtime manual landing. It wouldn't take 14 minutes for the crew to find out if it landed safely or not.
- timdiggerm 14y ago
  That's true, but don't forget that the skycrane was necessary because it's Mars. The atmosphere is thick enough to be a problem, but thin enough that you can't just use parachutes, and the gravity is high enough that only lightweight things can use airbags. Skycrane seems great...but even it is not good for something as heavy as a manned landing. We don't have a good way to land humans on Mars.

thangalin 14y ago

Humans have no backup. Our curiosity aside, having an extra-terrestrial colony is an excellent reason to visit Mars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

pyoung 14y ago
Although I would argue that Mars is a poor choice for a backup. It is fairly inhospitable and relatively close to earth. I think generation ships would be a better investment if this is our goal. Although Mars would be a good stepping stone.
- thangalin 14y ago
  How would a space vessel be more hospitable than a planet with water, a partial atmosphere, caverns below solid rock, a small magnetosheath, and 62% of Earth's gravity? *Edit: Instead of sending tonnes of metal into Earth's orbit from Earth, would it be more efficient to set up shop on Mars? Mine Mars and build space vessels in Martian orbit. Launching materials into Martian orbit should be relatively trivial compared with Earth.
  - pyoung 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship The end goal of the generation ship would be to colonize a planet in a far flung solar system. I would imagine that with the number of planets in existence, we could find one that was more hospitable than mars. This would also provide a more robust 'backup' for our species, in the case that the extinction event was solar system wide. Once again, I think Mars is a good stepping stone (for reasons that you mention), but I also imagine that a lot of the technology that would allow us to establish a sustainable colony on Mars would also allow us to develop robust generation ships.

jksmith 14y ago

Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh pitching to bankers in the movie "Spirit of St Louis:" "We have to know...We have to try."

Florin_Andrei 14y ago

Exactly. Same argument applies for life extension, or any other radical change like that. Nobody forces you to follow in the wake of the pioneers. You can always just stay behind.

geuis 14y ago
You got it perfectly. I want to go for the experience and opportunity. But I also want to build something for the future. No one remembers the people that stay behind and live out their lives, but the names and deeds of the founders of Pensacola, St. Augustine, and Jamestown are taught and remembered. Another reason to settle other places in the solar system is that we can do so without guilt. In America, we have remember the atrocities commited during the building of the USA. On Mars, the moon, and anywhere else it's all fresh and no one is there. I don't have my own family yet, so the idea of literally building a new world where my kids and grandkids grow and thrive has a strong attraction too. Maybe they would hate that they were born on Mars with little or no chance of returning to Earth, but I have to hope that they see it as their world and their future.
- freehunter 14y ago
  When I went to sleep after the Curiosity landing, I had a dream that I was on Mars with a group of colonists. I "overheard" someone say "this is the first child born outside of Earth". Imagining someone who is a citizen (by virtue of their parents) of a country they've never seen, on a planet they've never visited... I woke up in wonderment that this is going to happen some day. I hope I'm around to see it.
  - geuis 14y ago
    I hope it's your kid or mine. That's a great, great dream.
- kayoone 14y ago
  Born on Mars? Come on, we MIGHT be able to put a man on the Mars in 15 years, colonizing it so that your kids can be born there is far away.

colanderman 14y ago

Your argument is illogical. From "exploration is desirable" you conclude "humans should explore"; but this doesn't refute "humans should explore using robots as sensory extensions" like you imply in your first paragraph.

joshlegs 14y ago

I would also point out that when people did first start exploring our own world, it was fraught with peril. Many died as they settled new areas and explored. So, obviously we see what happened as we explored our own world and some of the benefits it has reaped (opening up new resources, etc.). So why WOULDN'T we want to explore other worlds?