Comment by inaros
8 hours 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...
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
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...
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.
>> Our Mars robots are awesome, but they take years to accomplish what astronauts could do in days.
What? The unmanned space program has been beyond the edges of our solar system. Meanwhile humans have been day tourists in space. I don't know how you can come to this conclusion that "humans > robots" when humans have never even been close to the surface of Mars.
>> Even just a tiny temporarily occupied Mars science outpost would be a tremendous boost to our understanding of the planet
How many robots could we land with the equivalent resources, or telescope satellites, or autonomous probes?
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.
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?
> So what specific scientific task on the Martian surface, requires a human hand, that current or near future robotics and remote operation cannot accomplish?
We don't know, and that's the entire point, we'll we when we get there. But there is at least one thing that cannot be done by robots, and that's studying how humans are doing on Mars. In the same way that a significant fraction of the research being done on the ISS is about human biology.
And sure, a human Mars mission is going to be extremely expensive, but I think it is worth it. It not only has scientific value, if only for the biological aspect, but it also has great symbolic value. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is the idea that we are sacks of microbes, and by getting there, there is a good chance for us to contaminate the planet, possibly killing any chance we may have at discovering Martian life.
Better to divert money to space exploration than to use it for war on the only planet we currently have.
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.
A nation that borrows in its own currency can’t be forced to default.
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...
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.
Would that toe-hold actually survive without constant resupply vessels?
There's cheaper ways to doom a dozen people to a slow, inevitable death.
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.
5 replies →
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?
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.
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.
We are not in a meeting at SpaceX trying to please Elon. I dont think you realize what you are up against...Do you know what radiation does to humans?
For example Suni Williams went to the ISS and got stuck for 9 months. Come back white haired, with bone loss, muscle wasting, and vision damage. She retired from NASA within months. And the ISS is inside Earth magnetosphere...
FYI Mars has no magnetic field and almost no atmosphere. The Curiosity radiation detector measured the following:
Mars surface: 0.67 mSv/day (that is about 70x Earth surface)
In Deep space transit: 1.8 mSv/day
for example the ISS in low Earth orbit: 0.5–1.0 mSv/day
Even with VERY optimistic 3 month transits you are looking at a total for an astronaut of about 700 mSv if you have 450 to 500 day surface stay . That is well over NASA entire career radiation limit for astronauts in a single trip. A major solar particle event could add hundreds more in hours...
And if you say they would live underground, then you have sent humans 225 million km to live in a bunker...Every EVA would accumulate 0.67 mSv/day with zero medical infrastructure...And by the way aluminum shielding on the Martian surface actually increases dose due to secondary neutron production, you need meters of regolith or water to make a real difference. Meanwhile, Curiosity has radiation hardened hardware, and after 13 years is still going.
Send lots of robots...
SpaceX already shifted to focus on a Moon base and away from Mars.
The original plan was to send a few self-financed Starships to Mars as a first step which sounded reasonable as an experiment.
Nothing wrong with dreaming about solving hard problems like radiation and how to manage logistics at such a distance. Even if a human base ends up not making sense most of that stuff would still support a robotic base doing most of the exploration, with some temporary human visitors helping set things up.
2 replies →
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.
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.
2 replies →
>> 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...