10 ms·

The blunt reality is that us meatbags are utterly ill-suited in every way to exist anywhere other than Earth (or someplace very Earth-like), and it requires a s

by lukifer 12y ago

The blunt reality is that us meatbags are utterly ill-suited in every way to exist anywhere other than Earth (or someplace very Earth-like), and it requires a staggering amount of resources to climb uphill against that fact. I'm happy that we went to the moon (a truly mind-blowing achievement), and I hope that a human someday walks on Mars; but in an age of robotics, manned space travel is no longer the optimal way to explore or conduct research. Even its utility as a PR stunt has rapidly diminishing returns. The good news is that the ever-growing sophistication of mechanical devices gives our species incredible "virtual fingers" to probe and interact with the cosmos, whether for research, or industry (such as asteroid mining, and perhaps someday, long-term terraforming). And of course, I hold out hope that our cyborg/android/AI great-grandchildren will someday roam the stars in a way that we primates can only dream of.

WalterBright 12y ago
We should be sending probes packed with extremophile bacteria to Mars and hope something takes hold.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
melling 12y ago
I tried to make this case back in August after the Spaceship One accident. "Someone dying is devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly. In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe." If you read the threads you get a lot of people who don't buy it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279
- magicalist 12y ago
  And as was asked in that thread, of all the human endeavors in which entire lives are spent and sometimes lost, why focus in particular on this one?
  - melling 12y ago
    Because we can iterate more quickly and conquer space faster. In 200 years, if we do it my way we'll have far more humans living in space than if we do it a few humans at a time. The point that you're completely missing is that I'm not saying that humans shouldn't eventually head out into space, it's that we should quickly interate our machines and other technology before we make the big push.
    - protomyth 12y ago
      > The point that you're completely missing is that I'm not saying that humans shouldn't eventually head out into space, it's that we should quickly interate our machines and other technology before we make the big push. Which means we will never do it. People are not as concerned about the national debt because they don't think they will have to pay it. Ditto for a lot of other events and practices. The related item to that short-sightedness is that things that don't excite the public won't get done. We are already dealing with a generation or two that didn't get their jet-pack, flying cars[1], cyberpunk, or space planes to vacation space stations. Getting the PR to get funding for something that won't happen in the current generation's lifetime is a no go. 1) yes, impractical and dumb, but it was a sign of the supercool sci-fi tech - hell, we don't even have an SST anymore
      - melling 12y ago
        We didn't get our humanoid robots either. How about we finish that job then send a few thousand of them throughout the solar system? Start exploring, mining asteroids, building bases, building other robots in space, etc. We can justify the research money spent on them because it has a direct payoff: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Why-Japan-has-fallen-in-love-with-human-looking-5954450.php http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Why-Japan-has-fallen-in-l...
goodcanadian 12y ago
I see this attitude a lot, and I suppose that there is a certain truth to it, but it always seems incredibly short sighted to me. I am never sure how to respond except: -humans aren't meant to fly. -humans are incredibly unsuited to cross large stretches of ocean. -humans aren't built to travel faster than a horse's pace.
- bnegreve 12y ago
  I see an important difference. Planes, boats and cars are technology. Before we had planes, there were scientific evidences that objects heavier than air could fly (= birds). This in fact was a strong motivation for people to develop the technology. We can go on Mars, that's for sure, it's close enough. But intergalactic space travel is harder. Not because of the limits of our technology, but because of physics. Not only there is not evidence that it's possible but there are strong theoretical results that suggest that we can't simply "travel in hyperspace" as they do in Star Wars. You seem to believe that science can solve these problems, but today science is what's stopping us from doing it.
  - goodcanadian 12y ago
    I didn't say anything about interstellar travel let alone intergalactic travel. We are very clearly talking about exploring the solar system.
    - bnegreve 12y ago
      Ok, but you get my point: there may be actual limits to the development of space travel technology. Your logic seemed to imply there was none. Sorry for speculating though.
  - lmm 12y ago
    Intergalactic travel may be implausible, but I've seen results that a civilization using Orion-drive-level technology - that is, using the kind of thing we could build today if we had the will to do so - could colonize the galaxy in a mere hundred million years. There's no scientific or technological barrier to that, only a political one.
magicalist 12y ago
There is no foundation for this argument to stand on. Besides the fact that sending humans vs sending robots isn't a zero sum game, we're also sending robots out with decreasing frequency as well. "We should be happy to just send robots" would be great if we were actually sending robots. Here's hoping China and India pick up the mantle when Oppy and Curiosity finally shut down, I guess. The reality is also that we don't learn much science with practical benefits for the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars we spend on these probes. Of course, we also get wildly poor returns on investment for the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars we spend (in the US) on defense and health care. What we've decided is that it's worth it to spend a small amount of our money on the exploration of our universe, that discovery can be its own reward (and if there's a small chance in practical payoffs down the line, even better). We don't need to see what the surface of Pluto looks like, but I'm pretty excited to find out about it. Dismiss that as PR, but apply it equally. This argument functions similarly to the one demanding we solve all the problems on earth before we start spending money on space. It assumes a way of allocating funds that doesn't match reality and demands unrealistic requirements not imposed on the favored approach.
- rgbrenner 12y ago
  > the fact that sending humans vs sending robots isn't a zero sum game only if we pretend there's infinite money available. if sending a single human being to mars/moon is so expensive that NASA isn't capable of doing anything else.. then it is a zero-sum game. > The reality is also that we don't learn much science with practical benefits for the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars we spend on these probes. It's unfair to compare one probe against sending a human. The moon landing cost $150 billion. Is a human more valuable than 100 or 500 of these probes?
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    >only if we pretend there's infinite money available. If we cut out bank bailouts (wasted money) and 95% of the defence/wars budget (wasted money) we could increase the NASA budget probably at least 100x. The money's there, it's just being squandered.
xenophonf 12y ago
As ever I find myself inspired by Kerbal Space Program. I hate flying my kerbals anywhere, because irrationally I don't want them to die horrible flaming explosive deaths due to some error or miscalculation on my part. Instead I nearly always send probes - it's definitely cheaper, and it's totally guilt-free in the face of my almost-certain screw-ups. That said, there's something deeply satisfying about flying my little green men somewhere, landing, and having a good walkabout. It isn't at all rational. I think real life is the same. There are plenty of places on Earth inimical to human life---Everest's death zone springs immediately to mind---and yet people travel to these places purely out of a sense of adventure. So too with space. "Because it's there" is a damn fine reason to go to the stars.
teddyh 12y ago
“If scientific knowledge was all we were after, then the Federation would have built a fleet of probes, not starships. Exploration is about seeing things with your own eyes.” — Captain Kathryn Janeway, One Small Step, Star Trek Voyager Season 6, Episode 8
bane 12y ago
> manned space travel is no longer the optimal way to explore or conduct research With one exception, research into how people can travel in space. In my mind, that research goal trumps every single other possible research target. Getting our species off this rock and spread out like so many seeds is the single most critical long-term goal for all humanity. No amount of soil surveys or robot comet missions will achieve this. No number of star maps, extra-solar planets, or infrared skycharts will actually get our species up and out. Imagine all the science that Opportunity has performed. Now think what six astronauts with shovels and a mobile lab tent on Mars could do in the same time. Would it require more resources? Sure, I require more resources than my electronic keyboard here on Earth. But I'm more important.
- Imerso 12y ago
  You can do the same experiments inside the gravity well of Earth, without the extra cost of sending humans and all the survival equipment required. With all the money that you save you can experiment with humans close to Earth and use the money you save to send many robots to do the actual exploration, which will survive longer than humans and do much more work. Of course you won't get the same publicity. So maybe just for that it's better to send humans, but not for scientific reasons.
  - bane 12y ago
    > You can do the same experiments inside the gravity well of Earth, without the extra cost of sending humans and all the survival equipment required. No you can't. You simply can't put people on Mars without putting people on Mars. All that extra equipment is the experiment. Operating for years at a time in Mars local environment is the experiment. Getting humans out of Earth's gravity well and living, generationally on some other ball of rock (or in a habitat of some kind) is the experiment. You can't ever do those things without actually doing those things and doing that is the experiment. The single most important question that we have to answer is this, can we or our descendants survive the cataclysmic destruction of our planet by colonizing space, or are we an evolutionary dead-end, destined to be snuffed out the first time the sun burps in our direction or an island sized boulder plows into Europe? Are we no better than all the other helpless animals who evolution didn't gift with the power of survival in the face of absolute destruction, or is that gift real? Are we just fancy, clothes wearing, monkeys? Answering that question is answerable with only one experiment, and that's actually doing it. It's an endeavor that makes the necessity of something like the LHC look like child's play, but the answer it yields could be the difference between our collective termination and the future survival of our progeny. No amount of simulations or probes can ever answer that. That's a path towards the slow extinction of our species, surrounded by the knowledge of the cosmos, as gathered by our instruments, but not our senses.
pi-err 12y ago
I was as excited to see Phillae land on a comet as I would have been if it were a human. It feels irresistible to me that robots are human's presence outside Earth. We're sharing the same network. Still I'm not surprised if a permanent Moon base replaces ISS in the future. At that point, doesn't it make more sense to build on solid ground rather than in a low-orbit mecano bound to burn in the atmosphere? Pretty sure as well that we are all underestimating leisure and entertainment as a driver of future space exploration. This is the true Jurassic Park. Air travel didn't become routine for science but thanks to tourists.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  To be fair, air travel become routine because of a couple of wars. I don't see people spending that much on leisure. People spend on food and energy, then tools they need for work. If any money (or credit) remains, then they spend on anything else.
atlantic 12y ago
Agreed. And this in turn implies that the best way to advance space exploration is not by doing space exploration, but by investing in AI development. When AIs become smart and autonomous enough, then money spent on actual space travel will again be well spent.

by lukifer 12y ago

WalterBright 12y ago

We should be sending probes packed with extremophile bacteria to Mars and hope something takes hold.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

melling 12y ago

I tried to make this case back in August after the Spaceship One accident. "Someone dying is devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly. In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe." If you read the threads you get a lot of people who don't buy it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279

magicalist 12y ago
And as was asked in that thread, of all the human endeavors in which entire lives are spent and sometimes lost, why focus in particular on this one?
- melling 12y ago
  Because we can iterate more quickly and conquer space faster. In 200 years, if we do it my way we'll have far more humans living in space than if we do it a few humans at a time. The point that you're completely missing is that I'm not saying that humans shouldn't eventually head out into space, it's that we should quickly interate our machines and other technology before we make the big push.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    > The point that you're completely missing is that I'm not saying that humans shouldn't eventually head out into space, it's that we should quickly interate our machines and other technology before we make the big push. Which means we will never do it. People are not as concerned about the national debt because they don't think they will have to pay it. Ditto for a lot of other events and practices. The related item to that short-sightedness is that things that don't excite the public won't get done. We are already dealing with a generation or two that didn't get their jet-pack, flying cars[1], cyberpunk, or space planes to vacation space stations. Getting the PR to get funding for something that won't happen in the current generation's lifetime is a no go. 1) yes, impractical and dumb, but it was a sign of the supercool sci-fi tech - hell, we don't even have an SST anymore
    - melling 12y ago
      We didn't get our humanoid robots either. How about we finish that job then send a few thousand of them throughout the solar system? Start exploring, mining asteroids, building bases, building other robots in space, etc. We can justify the research money spent on them because it has a direct payoff: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Why-Japan-has-fallen-in-love-with-human-looking-5954450.php http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Why-Japan-has-fallen-in-l...

goodcanadian 12y ago

I see this attitude a lot, and I suppose that there is a certain truth to it, but it always seems incredibly short sighted to me. I am never sure how to respond except: -humans aren't meant to fly. -humans are incredibly unsuited to cross large stretches of ocean. -humans aren't built to travel faster than a horse's pace.

bnegreve 12y ago
I see an important difference. Planes, boats and cars are technology. Before we had planes, there were scientific evidences that objects heavier than air could fly (= birds). This in fact was a strong motivation for people to develop the technology. We can go on Mars, that's for sure, it's close enough. But intergalactic space travel is harder. Not because of the limits of our technology, but because of physics. Not only there is not evidence that it's possible but there are strong theoretical results that suggest that we can't simply "travel in hyperspace" as they do in Star Wars. You seem to believe that science can solve these problems, but today science is what's stopping us from doing it.
- goodcanadian 12y ago
  I didn't say anything about interstellar travel let alone intergalactic travel. We are very clearly talking about exploring the solar system.
  - bnegreve 12y ago
    Ok, but you get my point: there may be actual limits to the development of space travel technology. Your logic seemed to imply there was none. Sorry for speculating though.
- lmm 12y ago
  Intergalactic travel may be implausible, but I've seen results that a civilization using Orion-drive-level technology - that is, using the kind of thing we could build today if we had the will to do so - could colonize the galaxy in a mere hundred million years. There's no scientific or technological barrier to that, only a political one.

magicalist 12y ago

There is no foundation for this argument to stand on. Besides the fact that sending humans vs sending robots isn't a zero sum game, we're also sending robots out with decreasing frequency as well. "We should be happy to just send robots" would be great if we were actually sending robots. Here's hoping China and India pick up the mantle when Oppy and Curiosity finally shut down, I guess. The reality is also that we don't learn much science with practical benefits for the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars we spend on these probes. Of course, we also get wildly poor returns on investment for the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars we spend (in the US) on defense and health care. What we've decided is that it's worth it to spend a small amount of our money on the exploration of our universe, that discovery can be its own reward (and if there's a small chance in practical payoffs down the line, even better). We don't need to see what the surface of Pluto looks like, but I'm pretty excited to find out about it. Dismiss that as PR, but apply it equally. This argument functions similarly to the one demanding we solve all the problems on earth before we start spending money on space. It assumes a way of allocating funds that doesn't match reality and demands unrealistic requirements not imposed on the favored approach.

rgbrenner 12y ago
> the fact that sending humans vs sending robots isn't a zero sum game only if we pretend there's infinite money available. if sending a single human being to mars/moon is so expensive that NASA isn't capable of doing anything else.. then it is a zero-sum game. > The reality is also that we don't learn much science with practical benefits for the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars we spend on these probes. It's unfair to compare one probe against sending a human. The moon landing cost $150 billion. Is a human more valuable than 100 or 500 of these probes?
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >only if we pretend there's infinite money available. If we cut out bank bailouts (wasted money) and 95% of the defence/wars budget (wasted money) we could increase the NASA budget probably at least 100x. The money's there, it's just being squandered.

xenophonf 12y ago

As ever I find myself inspired by Kerbal Space Program. I hate flying my kerbals anywhere, because irrationally I don't want them to die horrible flaming explosive deaths due to some error or miscalculation on my part. Instead I nearly always send probes - it's definitely cheaper, and it's totally guilt-free in the face of my almost-certain screw-ups. That said, there's something deeply satisfying about flying my little green men somewhere, landing, and having a good walkabout. It isn't at all rational. I think real life is the same. There are plenty of places on Earth inimical to human life---Everest's death zone springs immediately to mind---and yet people travel to these places purely out of a sense of adventure. So too with space. "Because it's there" is a damn fine reason to go to the stars.

teddyh 12y ago

“If scientific knowledge was all we were after, then the Federation would have built a fleet of probes, not starships. Exploration is about seeing things with your own eyes.” — Captain Kathryn Janeway, One Small Step, Star Trek Voyager Season 6, Episode 8

bane 12y ago

> manned space travel is no longer the optimal way to explore or conduct research With one exception, research into how people can travel in space. In my mind, that research goal trumps every single other possible research target. Getting our species off this rock and spread out like so many seeds is the single most critical long-term goal for all humanity. No amount of soil surveys or robot comet missions will achieve this. No number of star maps, extra-solar planets, or infrared skycharts will actually get our species up and out. Imagine all the science that Opportunity has performed. Now think what six astronauts with shovels and a mobile lab tent on Mars could do in the same time. Would it require more resources? Sure, I require more resources than my electronic keyboard here on Earth. But I'm more important.

Imerso 12y ago
You can do the same experiments inside the gravity well of Earth, without the extra cost of sending humans and all the survival equipment required. With all the money that you save you can experiment with humans close to Earth and use the money you save to send many robots to do the actual exploration, which will survive longer than humans and do much more work. Of course you won't get the same publicity. So maybe just for that it's better to send humans, but not for scientific reasons.
- bane 12y ago
  > You can do the same experiments inside the gravity well of Earth, without the extra cost of sending humans and all the survival equipment required. No you can't. You simply can't put people on Mars without putting people on Mars. All that extra equipment is the experiment. Operating for years at a time in Mars local environment is the experiment. Getting humans out of Earth's gravity well and living, generationally on some other ball of rock (or in a habitat of some kind) is the experiment. You can't ever do those things without actually doing those things and doing that is the experiment. The single most important question that we have to answer is this, can we or our descendants survive the cataclysmic destruction of our planet by colonizing space, or are we an evolutionary dead-end, destined to be snuffed out the first time the sun burps in our direction or an island sized boulder plows into Europe? Are we no better than all the other helpless animals who evolution didn't gift with the power of survival in the face of absolute destruction, or is that gift real? Are we just fancy, clothes wearing, monkeys? Answering that question is answerable with only one experiment, and that's actually doing it. It's an endeavor that makes the necessity of something like the LHC look like child's play, but the answer it yields could be the difference between our collective termination and the future survival of our progeny. No amount of simulations or probes can ever answer that. That's a path towards the slow extinction of our species, surrounded by the knowledge of the cosmos, as gathered by our instruments, but not our senses.

pi-err 12y ago

I was as excited to see Phillae land on a comet as I would have been if it were a human. It feels irresistible to me that robots are human's presence outside Earth. We're sharing the same network. Still I'm not surprised if a permanent Moon base replaces ISS in the future. At that point, doesn't it make more sense to build on solid ground rather than in a low-orbit mecano bound to burn in the atmosphere? Pretty sure as well that we are all underestimating leisure and entertainment as a driver of future space exploration. This is the true Jurassic Park. Air travel didn't become routine for science but thanks to tourists.

marcosdumay 12y ago
To be fair, air travel become routine because of a couple of wars. I don't see people spending that much on leisure. People spend on food and energy, then tools they need for work. If any money (or credit) remains, then they spend on anything else.

atlantic 12y ago

Agreed. And this in turn implies that the best way to advance space exploration is not by doing space exploration, but by investing in AI development. When AIs become smart and autonomous enough, then money spent on actual space travel will again be well spent.