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Folks...The US is effectively bankrupt with a 40 Trillion dollars debt in case you did not notice. The US Treasury is just a few minutes away from an economic e

by inaros 7mo ago

Folks...The US is effectively bankrupt with a 40 Trillion dollars debt in case you did not notice. The US Treasury is just a few minutes away from an economic event, that will force the US government to spend more than 70% to 80% of tax revenues on servicing said debt. There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars, much less colonize it. And with the current advances in robotics and automation there is nothing astronauts could do that a sophisticated robot team would not do better. Many interesting Scifi stories show, that really advanced civilizations quickly lose interest in extended Space travel, and we should take the hint...

flenserboy 7mo ago
but this is the economic case for it — if things are as dire as you paint them, this is the last chance to get a toehold off-world for at least 3-4 generations, if ever.
- pavel_lishin 7mo ago
  Would that toe-hold actually survive without constant resupply vessels? There's cheaper ways to doom a dozen people to a slow, inevitable death.
  - flenserboy 7mo ago
    not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.
    - pavel_lishin 7mo ago
      That's a fake binary. We could spend the money to prevent the world from degrading and rotting.
      - flenserboy 7mo ago
        but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone). without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
        pavel_lishin 7mo ago
        > without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up. I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money. Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.
        ElectronCharge 7mo ago
        I agree that if the best we can do is something that can't be self-sustaining, Mars should wait until that changes. I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground. Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!
    - skeeter2020 7mo ago
      >> not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic It seems reasonable to argue that giving up on a planet where everyone but a handful of people will be for the long-term future is the cowardly path.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- Tadpole9181 7mo ago
  You know those people would rely on endless, constant resupply missions for the rest of their lives with no hope of ever being returned home, right? How important is this to you? Are you willing to personally act as executioner and press the button than sends these people to their deaths, knowing we could just stop being able to send food and replacement equipment in a few years? We can't even keep our society stable and our people taken care and our home world clean. You think we are even close to terraforming or creating a society on Mars? Other than as some token of nerd approval, what does this extremely expensive and dangerous mission accomplish?
  - flenserboy 7mo ago
    this rhymes with the arguments for pullback at the end of Apollo, with the decades of stagnation that followed. doing things, & doing them at scale, is worth it if for no other reason than we can't know what spinoffs & useful developments will come of this. giving capable, motivated minds something to actually do, giving them a chance to explore & engage in trying things, is always preferable to keeping them tied down & hoping that they'll devote themselves to tossing away their dreams in order to make a beancounter happy.
b112 7mo ago
There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so, adds to scientific knowledge. If you want to argue against going into further debt to do so, well, that's a different argument. One I agree with.
- inaros 7mo ago
  >> Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so. Ok layout here your scientific or economic case...please. Because so far, the only trickle economic effects, where geriatric billionaires creating sub 100 km space rides to impress their Silicone Sally girlfriends...
- glenstein 7mo ago
  Agreed. At a bare minimum it's a hedge against terrestrial existential risks. And if Mars itself sucks, then, well, rotating space stations with simulated G, same principle. One terrible thing wrought by billionaire Mars fantasies is a backlash that I think has become too sweeping. It's wrongheaded for a million reasons, but it's nevertheless true that hedging against terrestrial existential risks is something we should have an interest in.
  - Tadpole9181 7mo ago
    Sorry, I'd love to hear exactly how a mars habitat with a half dozen people or a space station are "hedges against terrestrial existential risks"? Those are both "unfriendly" environments that lack the resources required to sustain themselves for any appreciable amount of time. And certainly don't have the number of people required to repopulate.
    - guzfip 7mo ago
      If I’m to believe the experts, LLMs are a panacea to all problems to have ever existed, like Blockchain before it. Therefore it is a non-issue as given that LLMs have only gotten exponentially more impressive, in [current_year+n] you will be able to prompt Claude to materialize a fast terraforming machine and FTL it over to mars.
wongarsu 7mo ago
Our Mars robots are awesome, but they take years to accomplish what astronauts could do in days. Our latest and greatest model (Perseverance) has traveled 40km (25mi) in 5 years, with the support of a scout helicopter. Which is more than what Curiosity managed in 13 years. But that's approximately what they did in Apollo 17 in five hours. Granted, Apollo 17 didn't make quite as many stops to analyze rocks, but it should give you an idea of the speed difference between our Mars robots and humans. Even just a tiny temporarily occupied Mars science outpost would be a tremendous boost to our understanding of the planet
- inaros 7mo ago
  Those robots were designed 20 years ago... You can send now a whole swarm of humanoid robots, that would recharge 24x7 out of a KRUSTY Reactor [1], you did not even had LLMs then. [1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03-KRUSTY%20Reactor%20Design.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03...
  - probably_wrong 7mo ago
    No, we really can't send something like that now. Or at least not if we want it to be useful on arrival. I'll make an educated guess that, as of this moment, there are zero functioning swarms of humanoid robots recharging on such a reactor on Earth. Once we add radiation shielding, software and hardware reliability, landing (marsing?) it all safely and deploying it (among others) I wouldn't be surprised if the earliest arrival time is, unsurprisingly, 20 years in the future.
  - UncleMeat 7mo ago
    why would a humanoid robot be preferable to one designed for the specific tasks at hand?
    - functional_dev 7mo ago
      maybe humanoids because tools already designed for human likes? if you send specialised robot it cannot use wrench or climb a ladder... you have to redesign everything
krunck 7mo ago
Better to divert money to space exploration than to use it for war on the only planet we currently have.
- slumberlust 7mo ago
  If your goal is to accelerate access to earth ending technology, then sure. We should probably figure out how to get along before we eqiup people with asteroid flinging tech.
lokar 7mo ago
A nation that borrows in its own currency can’t be forced to default.
- inaros 7mo ago
  Technically true, and completely meaningless. Can't default just means the government can print worthless paper instead. Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Argentina all borrowed in their own currencies...
  - lokar 7mo ago
    All three of them had major factors going on other than increasing the money supply. And it's the circulating money supply vs the size of the economy that matters, not money creation. For example, you can create a lot of money with no inflation, if you also remove a lot of money, eg via taxation.
GuB-42 7mo ago
With current technology, there is no way for a robot team to achieve what astronauts can achieve. With future technology, we don't know the future, autonomy is likely to improve, but so do space travel. Even the most advanced experimental robots we have today are closer in intelligence to a pile of rocks than they are to humans. They can do stuff in a controlled environment, and if given precise instructions, but space is anything but a controlled environment, and instructions take minutes to arrive, making real time control impossible unless the robot is painfully slow. There is a reason why it takes years for Mars rovers to do the job Apollo astronauts did in days. It is also why thousands of experiments have been conducted on the ISS, which is probably more than all unmanned satellite-based experiments combined. People are adaptable. They can deal with the unexpected, make repairs, etc... A little green man could wave at the robot and it wouldn't even notice because it wasn't programmed to expect little green men. Extreme amounts of efforts go into making sure our space robots deploy properly, simply because there is no one there to get things unstuck should it happen.
- inaros 7mo ago
  The Apollo comparison makes no sense. The Moon is 3 days away, Mars is 9 months. Every kilogram of human requires hundreds of kilograms of life support, shielding, food, water, and return fuel. For the cost of ONE crewed mission, you could send 50 to 100 robots to different locations across the planet, operating simultaneously for decades... The ISS comparison is even worse.... it orbits 400 km from Earth with constant resupply and emergency return in hours. That has zero in common with being trapped on Mars for 2 to 3 years with no rescue. And if a member of the crew dies, a very real probability on a first mission...the political fallout kills the program for a generation. A robot fails? Send another one...And on the issue of humans being more capable... Name one thing an astronaut could do on Mars that a well designed robot cant ? - Drill cores? Perseverance already does it. - Analyze mineral composition? Curiosity has a full chemistry lab onboard. - Microscopy? Done remotely since 2004. - Collect and cache samples? Done. - Navigate unpredictable terrain autonomously? Done. - Detect bio signatures? Instruments do it better than human senses ever could. You can land a robot with a spectrometer, a microscope, a drill, an X-ray diffractometer, and a gas chromatograph, so literally an entire laboratory, and operate it from Earth for a decade at 1/100th the cost. So what specific scientific task on the Martian surface, requires a human hand, that current or near future robotics and remote operation cannot accomplish?

by inaros 7mo ago

flenserboy 7mo ago

but this is the economic case for it — if things are as dire as you paint them, this is the last chance to get a toehold off-world for at least 3-4 generations, if ever.

pavel_lishin 7mo ago
Would that toe-hold actually survive without constant resupply vessels? There's cheaper ways to doom a dozen people to a slow, inevitable death.
- flenserboy 7mo ago
  not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.
  - pavel_lishin 7mo ago
    That's a fake binary. We could spend the money to prevent the world from degrading and rotting.
    - flenserboy 7mo ago
      but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone). without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
      - pavel_lishin 7mo ago
        > without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up. I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money. Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.
        ElectronCharge 7mo ago
        I agree that if the best we can do is something that can't be self-sustaining, Mars should wait until that changes. I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground. Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!
  - skeeter2020 7mo ago
    >> not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic It seems reasonable to argue that giving up on a planet where everyone but a handful of people will be for the long-term future is the cowardly path.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
Tadpole9181 7mo ago
You know those people would rely on endless, constant resupply missions for the rest of their lives with no hope of ever being returned home, right? How important is this to you? Are you willing to personally act as executioner and press the button than sends these people to their deaths, knowing we could just stop being able to send food and replacement equipment in a few years? We can't even keep our society stable and our people taken care and our home world clean. You think we are even close to terraforming or creating a society on Mars? Other than as some token of nerd approval, what does this extremely expensive and dangerous mission accomplish?
- flenserboy 7mo ago
  this rhymes with the arguments for pullback at the end of Apollo, with the decades of stagnation that followed. doing things, & doing them at scale, is worth it if for no other reason than we can't know what spinoffs & useful developments will come of this. giving capable, motivated minds something to actually do, giving them a chance to explore & engage in trying things, is always preferable to keeping them tied down & hoping that they'll devote themselves to tossing away their dreams in order to make a beancounter happy.

b112 7mo ago

There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so, adds to scientific knowledge. If you want to argue against going into further debt to do so, well, that's a different argument. One I agree with.

inaros 7mo ago
>> Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so. Ok layout here your scientific or economic case...please. Because so far, the only trickle economic effects, where geriatric billionaires creating sub 100 km space rides to impress their Silicone Sally girlfriends...
glenstein 7mo ago
Agreed. At a bare minimum it's a hedge against terrestrial existential risks. And if Mars itself sucks, then, well, rotating space stations with simulated G, same principle. One terrible thing wrought by billionaire Mars fantasies is a backlash that I think has become too sweeping. It's wrongheaded for a million reasons, but it's nevertheless true that hedging against terrestrial existential risks is something we should have an interest in.
- Tadpole9181 7mo ago
  Sorry, I'd love to hear exactly how a mars habitat with a half dozen people or a space station are "hedges against terrestrial existential risks"? Those are both "unfriendly" environments that lack the resources required to sustain themselves for any appreciable amount of time. And certainly don't have the number of people required to repopulate.
  - guzfip 7mo ago
    If I’m to believe the experts, LLMs are a panacea to all problems to have ever existed, like Blockchain before it. Therefore it is a non-issue as given that LLMs have only gotten exponentially more impressive, in [current_year+n] you will be able to prompt Claude to materialize a fast terraforming machine and FTL it over to mars.

wongarsu 7mo ago

Our Mars robots are awesome, but they take years to accomplish what astronauts could do in days. Our latest and greatest model (Perseverance) has traveled 40km (25mi) in 5 years, with the support of a scout helicopter. Which is more than what Curiosity managed in 13 years. But that's approximately what they did in Apollo 17 in five hours. Granted, Apollo 17 didn't make quite as many stops to analyze rocks, but it should give you an idea of the speed difference between our Mars robots and humans. Even just a tiny temporarily occupied Mars science outpost would be a tremendous boost to our understanding of the planet

inaros 7mo ago
Those robots were designed 20 years ago... You can send now a whole swarm of humanoid robots, that would recharge 24x7 out of a KRUSTY Reactor [1], you did not even had LLMs then. [1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03-KRUSTY%20Reactor%20Design.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03...
- probably_wrong 7mo ago
  No, we really can't send something like that now. Or at least not if we want it to be useful on arrival. I'll make an educated guess that, as of this moment, there are zero functioning swarms of humanoid robots recharging on such a reactor on Earth. Once we add radiation shielding, software and hardware reliability, landing (marsing?) it all safely and deploying it (among others) I wouldn't be surprised if the earliest arrival time is, unsurprisingly, 20 years in the future.
- UncleMeat 7mo ago
  why would a humanoid robot be preferable to one designed for the specific tasks at hand?
  - functional_dev 7mo ago
    maybe humanoids because tools already designed for human likes? if you send specialised robot it cannot use wrench or climb a ladder... you have to redesign everything

krunck 7mo ago

Better to divert money to space exploration than to use it for war on the only planet we currently have.

slumberlust 7mo ago
If your goal is to accelerate access to earth ending technology, then sure. We should probably figure out how to get along before we eqiup people with asteroid flinging tech.

lokar 7mo ago

A nation that borrows in its own currency can’t be forced to default.

inaros 7mo ago
Technically true, and completely meaningless. Can't default just means the government can print worthless paper instead. Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Argentina all borrowed in their own currencies...
- lokar 7mo ago
  All three of them had major factors going on other than increasing the money supply. And it's the circulating money supply vs the size of the economy that matters, not money creation. For example, you can create a lot of money with no inflation, if you also remove a lot of money, eg via taxation.

GuB-42 7mo ago

With current technology, there is no way for a robot team to achieve what astronauts can achieve. With future technology, we don't know the future, autonomy is likely to improve, but so do space travel. Even the most advanced experimental robots we have today are closer in intelligence to a pile of rocks than they are to humans. They can do stuff in a controlled environment, and if given precise instructions, but space is anything but a controlled environment, and instructions take minutes to arrive, making real time control impossible unless the robot is painfully slow. There is a reason why it takes years for Mars rovers to do the job Apollo astronauts did in days. It is also why thousands of experiments have been conducted on the ISS, which is probably more than all unmanned satellite-based experiments combined. People are adaptable. They can deal with the unexpected, make repairs, etc... A little green man could wave at the robot and it wouldn't even notice because it wasn't programmed to expect little green men. Extreme amounts of efforts go into making sure our space robots deploy properly, simply because there is no one there to get things unstuck should it happen.

inaros 7mo ago
The Apollo comparison makes no sense. The Moon is 3 days away, Mars is 9 months. Every kilogram of human requires hundreds of kilograms of life support, shielding, food, water, and return fuel. For the cost of ONE crewed mission, you could send 50 to 100 robots to different locations across the planet, operating simultaneously for decades... The ISS comparison is even worse.... it orbits 400 km from Earth with constant resupply and emergency return in hours. That has zero in common with being trapped on Mars for 2 to 3 years with no rescue. And if a member of the crew dies, a very real probability on a first mission...the political fallout kills the program for a generation. A robot fails? Send another one...And on the issue of humans being more capable... Name one thing an astronaut could do on Mars that a well designed robot cant ? - Drill cores? Perseverance already does it. - Analyze mineral composition? Curiosity has a full chemistry lab onboard. - Microscopy? Done remotely since 2004. - Collect and cache samples? Done. - Navigate unpredictable terrain autonomously? Done. - Detect bio signatures? Instruments do it better than human senses ever could. You can land a robot with a spectrometer, a microscope, a drill, an X-ray diffractometer, and a gas chromatograph, so literally an entire laboratory, and operate it from Earth for a decade at 1/100th the cost. So what specific scientific task on the Martian surface, requires a human hand, that current or near future robotics and remote operation cannot accomplish?