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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. To a layman like me the pictures are pretty convincing, but I know nothing about geology and very little about fungi.

It would be really neat if we had humans on Mars that could just walk over, pick something up and put it under a microscope and in a test tube. The paper itself cites several other authors that provide abiotic explanations. I wish we could just test it instead of speculating.

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It would be really neat if we had a robot on Mars that could just drive over, pick something up and put it under a microscope and in a test tube.

Where are Curiosity and Perseverance when they are needed??

Playing with their toy helicopters?

Toy helicopters that can peek over rocks and take short trips to locate potential sites like the article describes without having to commit the entire rover in that direction. Kind of like toys.

I agree with the cool-factor of having people on mars. And with that said: for this specific task, we could get remote robots to do this task with zero threat to well educated, trained, and physically fit human life. People on mars would be AMAZING... and, NOT having people on mars is amazing too: it gives us such a great moment where "Hey, we NEED to solve this with technology.", and I see that leading to benefits across the board.

Yeah sure we can build robots that can do a lot of specific things. But robot iterations are really long. You can tell a human to do a completely novel task with a twenty minute or so delay. I bet you'd find thousands of well educated, fit humans who would be willing to play robot on a one-way trip to Mars.

Humans probably could do in a week what all rovers have done over decades.

We are a long ways away from having robots that are advanced and flexible enough to replace people.

Well trained, educed people die every year in the thousands from completely unnecessary activities like wing suit jumping. Many millions if you include things like smoking and drinking.

I don't see anything wrong with a few astronauts willingly risking their lives on new frontiers.

And I'm sure this will happen once we have the capability. I think the primary reason why we haven't sent anyone to Mars is the lack of public interest and funding. We don't even have the rockets to launch any considerable payloads to Mars, without incurring insane cost.

Starship (the new rocket from SpaceX) makes me optimistic that things might actually happen in the next 1-2 decades.

There's a softly quantitative argument that humans are far better value for money than robots at doing science in space:

http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfbiac/Human_efficiency_pap...

The issue with a person doing a week of science on Mars is keeping them alive for the journey there, healthy enough (and alive) during the ground mission, and getting them back alive. Even if your astronaut is interested in a suicide mission that's still the trip there and ground mission. You also can't just send one, NASA figured out three is the minimum for best effectiveness.

So before any scientific equipment you've got literal tons of life support to get to Mars. For robotic probes they can be mostly scientific instruments. They also aren't really limited by consumables like astronauts.

It's not like astronauts wouldn't be cool or useful but for the same cost as one manned mission we can spam Mars with robotic probes. There's also the added benefit of an unexpected lithobraking not leading to some flag draped coffins and a total halt to the program for years.

Agree that robots make the most sense for space. But the robot route seems to lack the ability to push people to fund science. I’d be happier with the robot route if it compelled people the same way as sending people does. People are seemingly going to give a person being there a lot more attention than robots.

Or we need to retool and try to get robots to mine the asteroids for us-cus money.

Landing humans places doesn't do much to inspire science spending either. Congress lost interest in manned spaceflight after Apollo 11 landed. The public at large lost interest until the drama around Apollo 13 and then lost it again after they landed successfully. In the eyes of Congress the Space Shuttle was a multi-state jobs program and the public at large mostly ignored it unless some astronauts died.

I'm not against manned spaceflight at all but I think it's important to recognize it is very expensive per quanta of scientific data. In a world where money for pure science can be hard to come by it's often better to get more science bang for your space bucks.

This is the thoughtful and thorough post I wish I had made in my original comment. The efficiency of sending so much more robotic stuff seems as if it would certainly outweigh the benefits of "I'm just going to quickly get a sample".

>> Well trained, educed people die every year in the thousands from completely unnecessary activities like wing suit jumping.

Clearly, if we send people on Mars we should make sure they are not just well trained and educated.

> Humans probably could do in a week what all rovers have done over decades.

This seems highly unlikely at first glance, given the fact that Curiosity has been able to explore 25km and has been performing experiments and observations for 8 years and counting. A human on an exploratory Mars mission would not be able to venture any significant distance from the landing site (unless you also send a vehicle down), and they would definitely not survive for 8 years of soil-level observations.

To that end, I know that the science itinerary of the rovers is typically planned years in advance. What process exists for sending new experiments to the "top of the stack" in a situation of serious significance?

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