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You just need to look further. You get access to rare materials that can be immensely valuable.

Read https://www.amazon.com/Case-Space-Revolution-Spaceflight-Pos...

Also with that short term outlook you wouldn’t have many things. The Internet was not initially commercial. It was designed to provide communications in the event of a nuclear attack. Yet here we are now and we have reaped immense benefits from that investment.

It’s blindingly obvious that spaceflight makes sense to invest in. The issue is that the level of investment is large and the time horizon before a return is long. Sometimes government takes that role.

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> You get access to rare materials that can be immensely valuable.

Why would you want to send humans to get it? Space is really inhospitable for humans, but machines seem to like it just fine.

Offshore oil and gas mining is rapidly being automated, and if they could, they would eliminate humans from the process altogether. Nobody wants to go out and live on a frozen windblown metal can full of industrial machinery, in the middle of an ocean, that could sink at any time. That's why you have to pay people a lot of money to do it.

After you get over the romantic narrative of space, it really doesn't sound any more appealing than the oil platform. I mean, sure, I'm curious. But I wouldn't want to live there.

I don't know much about the intricacies of asteroid mining, but human beings are very capable entities. As great as machines like the Mars rovers are, there's no comparison. A human astronaut could probably accomplish as much in a week as a Mars rover can in a year. When I was reading the daily diaries of one of the rover drivers, it was incredible how much effort and thought went into the most trivial activities. A simple sounding task like "go look at that rock 20 meters away and take a picture of it" would be a multi-day effort, whereas it would only take an astronaut a few minutes

> A human astronaut could probably accomplish as much in a week as a Mars rover can in a year.

The estimates I've seen for a human mission to Mars are about 100-500 times the budget for Curiosity. So even if astronauts could accomplish things 52X faster (and I'm skeptical they would), it still wouldn't be as cost efficient. And that's even before you factor in the fact that the Mars Rover is going to be doing work on Mars much, much longer than a human mission would (Curiosity is going on 8 years).

Human space exploration is a solution in search of a problem. People don't seem to be rationally looking for the best way to get certain information from Mars or for the best sources of materials that could be obtained with future technology (there are many overlooked terrestrial ones) and soberly deciding that astronauts are the best answer. They seem to start out with the goal of defending human space exploration, and then searching for problems to try to justify it.

We (well, Europeans) explored the earth when it looked quite similar to space exploration today. Year-long journeys with very little chance of survival, and no idea what was waiting on the other side. We ended up making some amazing discoveries (the new worlds) that turned out to be of vast economical benefits. Who says space exploration can't be similar.

(Yes, there is a lot of controversy over colonialism that I won't get into here.)

> We (well, Europeans)

I think the Polynesians would like a word. And the "vast economic benefits" are dubious given the total human cost of introducing new diseases into unprepared ecosystems and populations - plus the import of abundant New World silver provided coin for the financing of the long, devastating mercenary wars of the early modern period in Europe and disrupted and destabilized the economy of China.

But in any case, humans had pretty much covered the globe outside Antarctica by the time Columbus set sail, in environments that, harsh as they may be, still provided breathable air, drinkable water and food if you knew how to hunt/scavenge/grow it.

The good thing about space is that you don't have to worry about the native people.

Let's hope someone with a similar view-point doesn't discover Earth, then! :D

Jokes aside, you are right, of course. We don't have to worry about environmental effects or native populations in the same way when dealing with off-World colonies on sterile worlds. That alone should provide some incentive for commercial exploitation of things like asteroids; at some point Earth will either run out of certain elements, or other factors will result in certain elements being more easily obtainable off-world.

It doesn't matter. The speed of light is too slow for anyone out there to get here in a reasonable amount of time. Even if the universe is densely populated with aliens more knowledgeable than us odds are none are close enough to establish useful communication. That is by the time they realize they know more than us and that knowledge arrives we probably will have discovered it in on our own. (that leaves room to have alien art on the wall but nothing else useful)

Well...until you do...

We didn't have robots at the time, though...

> Who says space exploration can't be similar.

We can see into the space through telescopes, while the seafaring explorers needed to literally go to some place to see what it was like.

We can't see crap now. We need more, bigger, better - and most importantly - space-based telescopes to be able to image interesting objects in anything resembling fidelity. There's e.g. a bunch of exoplanets, or hell, even planets in our own system, that we could image from a distance, if we could put couple hundred tons worth of equipment in space. For the more ambitious future, there are papers showing that you could even use the Sun itself as a lens to shoot pictures of exoplanets comparable with quality to photos of Earth from early days of space exploration! So, if we want to see things and truly learn about them remotely, we still have to get much better at sending things to space.

Robotics still ain't good enough to make it work alone, we'll need manned missions to establish a manufacturing-based economy in cislunar space, if we want to get anything done this century. Risky, manned missions, that in time will yield good profits.

I’d love to see a citation for one of those papers.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...

NASA has a whole page about it now. And here's a rather large paper (I remember reading a shorter version, but with the same pictures inside): https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11871.

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

See [32]-[35]

Those journeys usually had an economic motive, e.g. find a quicker route to Indonesia, and accidentally discovered new lands (to Europeans).

During much of the Earth exploration phase destinations in Asia had more food and money than Europe (also easier to survive a winter)... I don't see this ever being the case with Mars.

It's cheaper to ship materials to Low Earth Orbit from Mars, than it is to ship those same materials from earth. Can you imagine our current space industry (worth billions of dollars) could be operated from Mars? If there was a settlement on Mars, they could do it for approximately 2/3 of the (fuel) cost of doing it from Earth.

Of course, an industry established at a moon settlement could do it for even less. :-P (1/4)

I appreciate your thoughts, but they are sad thoughts to me.

Isn’t there something about “exploration” that seems important to a non-neglible amount of humans? I don’t want everything we do to serve the rat race we’re in. Let’s loose our money on something amazing.

Sure, as a society we do some things purely for emotional reasons. But we should be honest about that - we shouldn't pretend that the reason we're building the Washington monument is because of it's potential use as a grain silo.

There's a lot more to exploration than space exploration (I think exploring something like the human brain will end up having a greater emotional and practical impact myself). But even if we just look at space exploration, we don't really get a lot from human space flight. As I said, in situations where it's possible to use human astronauts, robots seem like they would be more effective. And for most of the places in our solar system, we simply won't be able to use humans at all anytime soon. The missions to, say, Europa are going to be done by robots.

Still, many people, including myself, enjoyed watching the launch. Maybe something like this is more analagous to a cathedral or memorial.

Light lag is one reason for humans to go. Until we crack robotics and AI to the point science can do itself (which I doubt it'll happen in the next 30-50 years), we'll still need humans micromanaging the robots remotely, and it's much easier to do with HD video streams and with millisecond RTT when you're on a science ship orbiting the body in question, vs. using occasional photos that take hours to send, on top of 3-22 minutes of lag, as we have now with Mars.

Not to mention, a probe or rover sent far away all have to go through one of the few DSNs, that can only do so much and so fast[0], and are generally scarce services. Forget about e.g. running 20 simultaneous robotic missions in different areas of Mars.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network#Curren...

which I doubt it'll happen in the next 30-50 years

I have to ask, why the rush? Why not wait 30-50 years until the robots are smart enough? Or we can bioengineer humans that are better adapted to that harsh environment?

This feels a bit like a real time strategy game, where someone at the start of the game wants to spend all their resources on big expensive research projects near the end of the tech tree. You're always better off building up the economy so you have enough surplus to tackle those expensive items later.

This is building the relevant aspects of the economy. Sitting on our butts, playing zero-sum games to squeeze more money out of each other with ads and products increasingly optimized to be as fragile as possible... that isn't getting us anywhere.

(Note that RTS economy is based around acquiring new resources. You can't make minerals by advertising, speculating, or even having your soldiers trade with each other. There are games that try to simulate trade, e.g. Stellaris, but even there it behaves more like a mine than like an economy.)

(Also: the rush is because our lifespans are finite, and I'd like to at least see some of that before I die.)

The leading self-driving vehicle company was bankrolled by ad money, so I think your cynicism is misplaced.

Also, in terms of bettering our lives... I'd bet advertising beats the ISS. What has the ISS given us? I know hundreds of small businesspeople that would never have gotten off the ground without modern advertising. There are people out there that click on ads and buy things, and that makes them happy.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/benefits...

It certainly is way overpriced in my opinion, but for me, it has served as a reason to wake up excited on many of my days off.

That being said, ads are a great way to bootstrap so many awesome things. I think the cynicism comes from the feeling of privacy invasion.

Our notion of exploration is very much tied to ancient history and in particular exploring places that we could not otherwise learn anything about other than by going there. The problem with space exploration is that we already have explored it to a huge degree just by using telescopes and remote probes. It's not entirely clear what humans could learn by going to somewhere like Mars, that couldn't otherwise be learned using satellites, robots and telescopes.

We send humans into space because we want to, science and engineering benefits are side rewards.

My problem with this framing of the argument is that it's reasoned from the position of "If we want to do X then how much do we have to spend to make it happen". It's very much a "moonshot" style of thinking where you are only considering doing it once, it's not sustainable and it's not scalable. What we need to be asking is "If we want to do X what systems do we need to put in place so that X is trivial". Then the goal becomes to build sustainable and profitable industries that make everything leading up to X easier, cheaper, safer, and more accessible to everyone. It's not as direct of a route but it has a compounding effect built into it that works for you and eventually does all the work to keep X going.

This is exactly what SpaceX is doing with the eventual goal of putting people on Mars. They've been finding and solving problems the whole time but the ultimate problem is that we still have all of our eggs in one basket and we're one asteroid, volcano, war, or pandemic away from civilizational collapse. Creating a self-sustaining population off planet is the only way to solve that problem.

The estimate I've seen was that fourteen years of work of Opportunity would have been two weeks for a geologist in a Mars buggy. So 52x is probably very pessimistic.

There are some latency involved when it comes to interplanetary exploration, not to mention communication between planets. That alone gives human exploration a certain advantage in some cases.

I suspect the majority of future exploration will stay robotic though. There are going to be some high-profile missions, but once we start looking more at asteroids and other targets far out in the solar system, then robots will continue to do the bulk of the work.

As far as I am concerned, the major breakthrough here is the reusability that SpaceX is bringing into the table. If we can lower prices of sending stuff to outer space, then we'll be able to do so much more with current space exploration budgets.

Humans are capable of doing things machines aren't. If you want some of those things done on Mars, there isn't much of a choice.

People who feel passionately about something impractical can get pretty creative trying to justify their passion. The creativity is the output here -- not the stated goal.

Perhaps ironically, advances in technology have generally served to make human space exploration more expensive, not less expensive, when compared to the alternative (unmanned/robotic exploration).

Do you have a link to said "daily diaries?" They sound fascinating, but this is the first I've heard of them.

https://marsandme.blogspot.com/ is Scott Maxwells blog about driving Spirit + Opportunity

Awesome, thanks!

I don't know enough about any of the relevant fields to speak with confidence about what advancements are more likely to happen in the next few decades, but it feels that the number of things we'd need to get better at to send humans further than lunar orbit with a decent chance of survival represent a far greater challenge than the relatively modest progress we would need to make in AI to make more capable and independent exploration craft.

Once the job finished, the machine is dispensable, but the astronaut definitely wanna go home, which will cost much much more.

This is actually not so bad. Returning to earth is (relatively) cheap. Returning to earth from the moon is really cheap, so the extra fuel mass is affordable. From Mars you probably want to scavenge it.

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt...

Has nobody considered sending an older astronaut and not bothering with a return trip?

I could imagine a lot of volunteers if you promised 5 years worth of dried food, comms back to earth and lots of fame.

Of course they did. It sparked a huge controversy back in ~2010-2013, when some known scientists and popular science authors (I'm pretty sure it was either L. Krauss or M. Kaku, but can't for the life of me find a reference now) started speaking up that sending older people on one-way trips would be a great way to lay foundations for a Mars colony, and there are lots of people who would happily volunteer to work until death on Mars.

Nobody knows their own life expectancy and geriatrics are perhaps not most suitable to survive in a harsh environment, running around an alien planet all day.

I'd volunteer. It would be the adventure of a lifetime (literally).

But this is something that's not going to be allowed.

Look at all the safety measures they're putting in spacecraft to ensure people live. No way is anyone going to approve a one way trip to Mars.

I sometimes wish people were more comfortable with their own mortality and death in general, but that's how all the humans with "warrior genes" died off.

"No way is anyone going to approve a one way trip to Mars."

If you would have the rockets and equipment and a place in a small state to launch the rockets: who do you need to approve it?

That's a long way off, if it ever happens. Rocket launches will be tightly regulated, in fact they already are as ICBMs. Any private launches without approval from a big power (or all of them) will likely be stopped by any means.

> but machines seem to like it just fine.

I think you are underestimating the challenges they have to overcome to get machines to work in space.

> I think you are underestimating the challenges they have to overcome to get machines to work in space.

Even if it’s hard, it’s still a lot easier than getting humans to work in space.

You don't understand the challenges. Sending humans up with semi-automated machines would actually be a lot easier than fully automated machines. The human race's entire experience so far has been with machines in 1g. We have almost zero experience making self repairing factories in any gravity. We have zero experience mining in low or zero gravity. It might take several generations of engineers and miners in space to figure out all of the problems, slowly automating each step at a time through trial and error like we've been doing for centuries.

The critical point you're missing is that any mining and processing equipment will require their own life support that will already be able to support humans. Machines are significantly more complicated without a gas to convect heat away from all surfaces, they'll need massive fluid handling and filtering systems for lubricants and cooling fluid, the mining operations will need tons of oxygen and scrubbing for their chemistry, and clean water will be required by pretty much every process. The only way we'll pull this off is by using our existing experience on this planet and that requires the same conditions that support life.

That sounds like I'm exaggerating but we've already spent more than a generation in space studying the effects of zero-g and we just barely got a working 3D printer on the ISS a few years ago. No advanced mining, processing, or other manufacturing equipment to speak of beyond lab scale R&D devices. We have one lab capable of continuous zero g research and a few 747s capable of achieving it a a few minutes at a time.

Exactly. I can't remember which NASA official I'm paraphrasing here (I think Gene Cernan?), but humans are the cheapest, most abundant, and most "fully automated" machines known today.

And self-replicating.

The problems you list seem to apply to both fully and semi automatic machines. E.g. wouldn’t human operated mining equipment need just as much lubrication as pre-programmed ones?

We never explored the surface of Mars, or landed on an asteroid before we had our machines do it, but we managed it anyway with the human operators still on Earth.

I think the difference is that humans can fix problems and adapt to changing conditions a lot better than machines currently.

Humans plus Earth-like environment. Remember that micro environment has to go with them everywhere, and they die within minutes without it functioning within relatively narrow constraints.

But there'll still be humans. Just not necessarily physically at the mine or factory. All you really need is a robotic chassis that has sufficiently good AI to use hands and follow basic instructions, perhaps helped by a guy in a VR suit back on earth or in a nearby spaceship. Perhaps aided by simulations to ensure low latency - things in space should be easier to simulate without the outside world interfering much.

> perhaps helped by a guy in a VR suit back on earth or in a nearby spaceship.

Definitely not "back on earth". Lag is an issue with VR as-is with mere milliseconds of it, and you'd be calling for minutes of latency there.

And "in a nearby spaceship" would, definitionally, involve getting humans most of the way there; might as well get them all the way there at that point.

I think it's interesting to explore whether remote-control VR lag can be combated with simulations. If you can simulate the other side well enough, you should be able to manipulate the simulation until you've got a recording that you're satisfied with and then send it. This is kind of how Mars rovers are steered today.

Obviously doing this for robots on Earth is tricky and largely pointless, given it's probably easier to just reduce the latency directly. For remote mining on asteroids or something there's not a whole lot going on in space. You're not going to get a random pedestrian or cyclist suddenly popping out in front of your robot. It's far more practical to model and simulate it entirely in e.g. a game engine, and then record it.

At least, that's my guess where things will go.

The point about the spaceship is not distance related but that building life support structures into everything is quite expensive, whereas building them once in a spaceship and then extending the human presence to all surrounding structures would be a lot cheaper.

> If you can simulate the other side well enough, you should be able to manipulate the simulation until you've got a recording that you're satisfied with and then send it. This is kind of how Mars rovers are steered today.

True, but that has limitations, right? Meteorite impacts, electromechanical failures, and such still do happen. Plus on Mars there's still dust flurries and such, and then you've got Titan with its "dummy thicc" atmosphere blowing stuff around even harder, though obviously asteroids wouldn't have those issues.

With the Mars rovers we're basically in a position of "well we'll run them as long as we can, but if they get stuck in a rut they're hosed". Spirit and Opportunity would probably still be running and collecting science if we had human crews nearby able to hop over and fix them up.

> The point about the spaceship is not distance related but that building life support structures into everything is quite expensive, whereas building them once in a spaceship and then extending the human presence to all surrounding structures would be a lot cheaper.

Right, but my point there is that "surrounding structures" implies you're basically pretty much there anyway. You don't necessarily need life support structures in the mining equipment itself; you just need some spot for the ship to dock for a sec while the maintenance crews don their spacesuits and do their repairs.

Even if we did build human-habitable areas in those "surrounding structures" (e.g. break rooms, workshops, bunks), as long as there's a supply chain to provide air/water/food (and the first two could likely be extracted from the asteroid itself) I suspect it wouldn't be that much of an additional cost in the grand scheme of things, especially when weighed against the increase in productivity.

Plus, you gotta think on the flip-side, too: would it make sense to haul all those life support structures around on a moving ship? If you're sending crews someplace often enough it seems reasonable to have those on-site and thus not have to haul all that mass with you (then again, depending on the length of the trip such facilities might be necessary anyway).

Is it really that much easier to build space robots to cover as much breadth of function as one astronaut-engineer in a space suit?

> Is it really that much easier to build space robots to cover as much breadth of function as one astronaut-engineer in a space suit?

No, but it’s tremendously easier to fly these robots there than doing the same with humans. We can afford to let robots “die” on Mars; humans not really.

I think you've answered your own question, which is an easier place to operate? A (admittedly salty) static platform a couple hours helicopter ride away, or a radioactive vacuum that requires years of planning to reach and which by the way is minutes away even by radio?

The fact we've yet to automate so much here with such large incentive to do so is evidence we're not there yet.

There's still no real substitute for having a person on site to do work when machines breakdown or get stuck and the problems with trying to use machines in their place get worse as the time lag between the machine and it's operators gets worse. Even on modern automated oil rigs there are people driving, repairing and monitoring the systems locally.

Really we're pretty far from semi-autonomous systems for stuff like mining, we're just starting to get problem solving working in AI just look at the DARPA challenge for how far we are from being able to assign relatively small tasks to resolve problems.

>> After you get over the romantic narrative of space, it really doesn't sound any more appealing than the oil platform. I mean, sure, I'm curious. But I wouldn't want to live there.

You are already living in space. :)

If anything the oil platform is much much more appealing. You can go diving and see a bunch of sea life. That's part of why as a human I'm more excited by sea steading than space exploration.

We can do both. We should do both, as both will provide technology for creating and maintaining artificial, closed environments for long-term habitation.

(Though in all honesty, I want to see both happen because I loved both Star Trek and SeaQuest DSV as a kid.)

Would it be exciting to terraform a planet or go to another star system and observe life there?

Would it be exciting to live in a tin can and do maintenance on air purifiers for 20 years?

As long as Earth streams memes :D

But yeah, it's not for everyone. Imo, it would be pretty exciting to continuously enlarge some sort of habitat somewhere.

In case there's no way to return to Earth, would definitely need a steady supply of drugs of all kinds and good doctors, otherwise suicides would become the number one cause of death soon enough.

That's what I meant by "hold off". It isn't commercial until it is. Government-sponsored developmental programs may one day pave the way for commercial operations, but that hasn't happened yet.

And the concept of space-mining likely will not involve people. We are already replacing men with machines in mines on earth because of associated costs. I imagine the first space miners won't be guys in spacesuits carrying shovels. They will be machines.

Especially given that we'll need to leave the magnetosphere to access a lot of space mining. You either bring a ton of shielding+food+water+life support+crew quarters, or you advance autonomous operation. One of those is already happening and highly applicable to other fields.

Imo what ever comes after homo sapiens inherits the solar system, not homo sapiens ourselves

The magnetosphere bit is intriguing... I've never heard of a proposal to use superconductors to generate a miniature magnetosphere outside of earth's. Even for earth orbit it seems that'd be helpful way to reduce radiation exposure. Superconductors should be able to be cooled to operating temperature readily enough, meaning minimal power once charged. Spaceship hulls are aluminum and non-ferromagnrtic. Odd to never have never heard of discussion on the idea. Anyone have resources for such tech?

This has already been proposed for shielding the entire planet Mars, see https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/moon-mars/a25493/magn... (2017). I'd love to see SpaceX take a crack at this, conceivably it would amount to launching a modified MRI into Mar's L1. It's actually within the launch capability of Falcon Heavy so it's something they could start working on now.

That's amazing! Even a few shipment of neodymium magnets could be sent. Then in a 1,000 years after the collapse of our civilization and emergence of a new technological civilization there'd be a Mars with much thicker atmosphere and potentially even liquid water.

Even for regular human asteroid mining it looks like an artificial magnetosphere would be possible: https://physicsworld.com/a/magnetic-shield-could-protect-spa...

It's still surprising to me that the notion isn't prevalent in sci-fi or even hard sci-fi. Though as you mention even a modified MRI could do the job.

I hope we can tag along as pets, or as being of religious importance.

> It’s blindingly obvious that spaceflight makes sense to invest in. The issue is that the level of investment is large and the time horizon before a return is long. Sometimes government takes that role.

Are you invested in spaceflight then? I don't see it being very obvious at all. Yes, some precious metals can be recovered in large quantities but they aren't intrinsically valuable. These materials are used in things like catalysts, batteries and chemical processes where we could also invest to remove the dependence on them.

You can invest in SpaceX indirectly and directly. You have SpaceX indirectly through some mutual funds and actually through Google since Google’s VC arm invested in SpaceX. I have a tiny bit in those two via a mutual fund and Google. The problem is both have SpaceX as a very small percentage of their portfolio. There is also Virgin Galactic but I don’t have that.

One material Robert Zubrin is interested in is a rare form of hydrogen. He thinks that it would be a good candidate for fusion if we ever figure it out.

Do you perhaps mean Helium-3? The only interesting rare form of Hydrogen is Tritium, and Tritium is rather nasty stuff.

You are right.

> they aren't intrinsically valuable

perhaps not, but materials in space can be assembled to functional components in space. functional components beget more things happening in space.

> remove the dependence on them

cool. you can beam electricity from space, too...

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