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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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