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Comment by sprucely | Hacker News Reader

That's what Breakthrough Starshot[1] is about, although scaled down to very small probes. I like the probe concept. If we really don't want all our eggs in this one basket, it seems to make more sense to put effort towards tech that can spread our seeds (whatever that may be) rather than humans physically traveling.

[1] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/

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Exactly - i think there should be more companies & organizations working towards pushing this. To become space-faring, we need to get from 1ev per bond of molecule level of energies obtained from chemical to 1GeV levels atleast!

We are a long ways from becoming space faring. For the cost of sending one human to Mars, we could send ten rovers to Mars.

Not if Elon Musk gets his way. If the cost profile works out, sending a human will be cheaper then sending a robot.

His cost estimates depend on hundreds of thousands of people signing up, to diffuse R&D costs. That's dubious.

Historically, colonists are self-interested. Typically they want to become rich, or they want to escape poverty or persecution. (Typically they're also poorly informed about just how dangerous their new life will be, and how much wealth they can expect to find, but in this age we shouldn't expect that to last much beyond the first landing). There's no precedent that I'm aware of for people leaving comfortable, privileged lives in mass to colonize someplace that has no wealth.

Giving a generation of people who grew up with science fiction as part of their daily lives the opportunity to move to a different planet is also unprecedented.

Even then, we can still send rovers more cost effectively than people! You can throw away the life support mechanisms, and so on, and get 550 tons of pure mars rover in your interplanetary transport. At ~800kg for a curiosity-level rover that gives about 600 rovers, instead of 100 people.

What to do with your 600 curiosity rovers on Mars is left as an exercise...

The Curiosity rover has driven 9 miles in a little over four years on Mars.

The Lunar Rover that came with Apollo 17 drove 22 miles in a little over 4 HOURS.

As it turns out, humans are the best robots.

Another way to view it is that human rovers must go fast, because humans are impatient. We could build a faster, battery powered robotic rover if we wanted, but why?

If it's simply mileage you want, Curiosity's RTG means it can just keep going for years. With an average speed of 30 meters/hr, I'm not seeing much reason to think that it wasn't capable of covering ~1000km over those 4 years (the LRV, on the other hand, could never exceed 92km, total, before the batteries ran out). But mileage simply wasn't the goal.

Yes, but with my super-rover-transporter system, we can cover 5,400 miles in the same time, with the 600 rovers. I'm envisaging a sort of airbag deployment system (like pathfinder) coupled with a dispenser system that fires a rover out every few minutes as the ship orbits the planet, for optimal coverage.

But to what end? Bigger and better probes? Finer and finer data points?

We can send probes forever, but when do WE go?

My underlying point is that we have enough data to start making attempts at settling Mars, and once we're there, we'll do more science and exploration than any existing robot can. If you doubt that, then show me a robot that can perform an archeological dig on a fossil site without destroying half of the fossils.

For the cost of sending one human to Hawaii, we can set up 10 weather stations instead.

Cost of putting Curiosity on Mars: $2.5 billion

Apple and Google combined valuation: over $1000 billion

The trouble is there are no new users and new ad impressions to be found on Mars.

Plus, mass driver approach is not the only way to use lasers right? Light can remotely power systems, heat solid propellants to extremely high temperature thus getting better thrusts, etc. So the technology, if scaled up correctly, can be used for large scale transport systems too.

They could be useful for some specific applications, but lasers have very limited effective range as power delivery systems when you're looking at the interplanetary scale. Unless you have very large collectors that is.

For example, for the lunar laser ranging experiment they use telescopes to direct the beam at the moon, but the beam is still 6.5 km wide at the moon's surface.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

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