Comment by anarticle
20 hours ago
> I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number.
Can you write this with a straight face? This feels like the opportunity of a life time for someone who wants to push the envelope on what is possible. Yes it will be expensive, but the tech and lessons we learn will surely be worth more. Consider all the developments from the Apollo program. This level of pessimism always shocks me, shouldn’t we rise to the challenge?
A rover is expendable, a human much less so. The PR cost of having a human smash into the surface of Mars the way it happened with a rover would easily outweigh the PR boost of having a human successfully land on Mars. And even if we managed to actually land someone, they'd most likely die there before we could bring them back.
A rover runs mostly on solar power. Humans need breathable air, food, potable water, medical supplies, stable temperatures, radiation shielding, etc etc just to survive, let alone actually do anything. Unlike sunshine, Mars has none of those things. And if any of them fail, your human rover would quickly go kaput.
It seems far more reasonable to use automation to build a livable outpost before sending a human there - especially because a human is going to need that outpost to survive anyway. So even if we want to send people to Mars eventually, automation would be step one.
I agree that automation and robots are a good proxy for exploration. And yes it will be tough. That won't stop people from trying.
PR or not, there are still skydivers and wing suit people pushing the envelope. I really don't agree with the doomerism/well actually crowd on these sorts of things, there is still the indomitable human spirit, no matter how irrational it seems. We still have field scientists that get sent to the edges of the earth to explore and find things, even when we think they have completely been explored. A friend of mine is an arctic botanist that spends 3-4m a year in the high arctic tundra doing research on plants in that biome.
There is no rational reason to want to cross the entirety of Antarctica, and yet humans have done it.