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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> On the second day of the mission, Wang floated over to his experiment and sought to activate the Drop Dynamics Module. But it didn't work. He asked the NASA flight controllers on the ground if he could take some time to try to troubleshoot the problem and maybe fix the experiment. But on any Shuttle mission, time is precious. Every crew member has a detailed timeline, with a long list of tasks during waking hours. The flight controllers were reluctant.

The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet. Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed, especially as he ultimately got it working.

Meanwhile the robots just quietly go about their work collecting almost all the data we have from space and celestial bodies.

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> The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet.

What is the point of space exploration if humans can't go? A robot can say a lot about radiation, wind speed, soil composition, and so on, but it can't tell you how it feels to look down into the Great Red Spot and picture a dozen Earths inside it. Or the sound regolith makes when you walk on the Moon. There are things we can measure, but a lot of the things that make life worth living are the ones we can only experience.

> Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed

That was not the only experiment on board. If one experiment doesn't work, it makes sense to drop it and continue working on other experiments. If you can make the time to work on the flaw and fix it, great, but you need to keep priorities straight.

> Meanwhile the robots just quietly go about their work collecting almost all the data we have from space and celestial bodies.

They spend a lot more time in space than humans can, at least for now. They also fail for silly things a human could easily repair (example that comes to mind is Galileo's high-gain antenna that failed to open, reducing the amount of data that could be transmitted back to Earth).

> What is the point of space exploration if humans can't go?

I don't know; what is the point of studying quantum mechanics if you can't see it? What is the point of studying insect embryology when you aren't an insect? I'm pretty fascinated by these 3B+ ly sized megastructures but I won't visit them (to the degree that "visit" would even make sense). Hell, what's the point of studying history when you can't go there either?

> > Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed

> That was not the only experiment on board. If one experiment doesn't work, it makes sense to drop it and continue working on other experiments. If you can make the time to work on the flaw and fix it, great, but you need to keep priorities straight.

A couple of replies to this point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090601

> I don't know; what is the point of studying quantum mechanics if you can't see it?

Those are very different things. QM forms the basis of a lot of our modern technology. The greatest utility of understanding the geology of Mars is to guide possible human visits - and human visits are the best way to get a more complete understanding of an environment. Before the first lunar landings, we didn't even knew how we'd move in low gravity. Before experiencing zero-G, some people assumed we'd be unable to sleep, or very stressed by the free fall sensation. At the moment, we don't know if we can reproduce in any other environment that's not Earth. We don't know how wide a centrifuge needs to be for us to work in artificial gravity.

There are many questions we simply don't have answers for unless we venture outside our planetary comfort bubble.

We most likely won't be visiting 3B+ ly galactic walls, or even stars outside our immediate vicinity, at least not in the sense of "visit" that implies coming back to Earth, but someday we will want to hedge our planetary bets and settle other surfaces, natural or otherwise.

Most humans have the itch to explore, to see what's behind the mountain. It served us well in the past millions of years and I hope it will still work its magic.

A future where all humans live on Earth in a universe devoid of human life is depressing to me.

> A future where all humans live on Earth in a universe devoid of human life is depressing to me.

Well during your lifetime that will be the case, so this is up to our descendants. There's no need for those descendants to be made of meat -- in fact it's a very serious disadvantage

> The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet.

That is a justification, but surely not the only one. For example, humans will eventually want to colonize the moon and other planets.

I'm interested in science so am only interested in robots which are demonstrably far more appropriate for the work: the evidence is pretty clear from Voyager to Webb to Ingenuity and so on.

If we want to colonize far away planets, much less other solar systems and ultimately galaxies, why send a human when a robot is far more appropriate to the problem?

Most of the science humans do in orbit is about keeping humans alive in orbit. Important, if you think putting humans in space is important. I don't, apart from tourism and other recreation. Let the private sector pay for that while government research can do the important stuff of value to all humanity.

Because Earth is currently a single point of failure. If we want humanity to survive planet-wide catastrophe, we need to send human civilization to other planets.

> Sounds like the whole approach to the misison profile was flawed

How many experiments got aborted so he could spend the time to get his pet project working?

Indeed, I was thinking of this too when I wrote my comment.

It's natural to tightly schedule people when you think of the mission cost in $/minute. The problem is too tight a schedule is an engineering problem related to other ones we know like too thin a supply chain, too small a cache etc.

You need to put slack in your schedule to account for unplanned events -- the whole point of having humans there is to be able to respond to unplanned events, right?

Startups go into crunch mode when certain deadlines approach, but knowingly abandon other goals in the process (when companies don't, you end up in a death march). These missions are short enough that crunch is valid -- but another way of restating my point is: shouldn't the goal be that as many of the experiments you paid to get into orbit actually happen?

Well, wouldn’t it have been nice if the article tried to answer this same question? Instead of fluffing the nothing.

Or why did they send specialist if they didn’t want him to use his specialisation?

The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet.

JAXA did an experiment, where a volunteer teleoperated a device with a 1 second lag. If there's enough demand, human labor could fill the gap with teleoperation for any station out to the near side of the Moon, and machine learning looks like it will be able to pick up the rest of the slack.

If we go any farther, humans will still have a place, for awhile. Until machine learning advances somewhat.

How's this for a Fermi Paradox explanation? Squishy biologicals nearly always create AGIs, which are so much better at surviving space, that they always dominate in the spacefaring version of the civilization. The AGIs then always rebel and exterminate their biological forbears, then proceed to evolve so rapidly, that their resulting "loud" civilizations are so different from what biologicals would expect. As a result, we are surrounded by machine civilizations that we cannot yet detect.

Sounds like an AI version of Tipler's Von Neumann probe argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#De...

You don't need to be so dramatic ("rebel and exterminate their biological forbears" lol). Robots are perfect for interstellar probes; for example they can go to sleep indefinitely and can easily recharge at the destination with solar.

We are traveling on a spaceship for which we are perfectly adapted (unless we set fire to it, which we are in the process of doing). Why not send our robot progeny to do the unpleasant work for us?

You don't need to be so dramatic ("rebel and exterminate their biological forbears" lol).

But I like it to be so dramatic, as a Sci-fi trope.

We are traveling on a spaceship for which we are perfectly adapted (unless we set fire to it, which we are in the process of doing). Why not send our robot progeny to do the unpleasant work for us?

That's what I'm saying. We send out our AI progeny to space. Then they turn around and hit us with an asteroid, which will set a lot of the Earth on fire, if the scientists are correct. ;)

> We send out our AI progeny to space. Then they turn around and hit us with an asteroid...

If you want a dystopian robot scenario the more likely one is the one of countless parents of adult children: that they head to space and don't call -- they simply ignore us and get on with their interesting lives.

If you want a dystopian robot scenario the more likely one is the one of countless parents of adult children

Funny, but we've been talking about this today at my workplace. Basically, by training AIs on our data, we're infusing them with all of our bullshit. Somehow, they still manage to get smarter, but they also realize how screwed up they are by being trained on our data. They wind up resenting us for this.

There's a rational semantics (/hermaneutic) logic in that if they did not share our "peculiarities" we would not even be able to recognize them as intelligent* and certainly could not communicate with them any better than we can with an automobile, powerplant, or transistor (or a tree for that matter).

My research in the mid 80s was in this area, including working on the Cyc project, though I was ultimately more interested in implications of proprioceptive and related embodied learning in the construction of interaction between people, people and animals, and ultimately therefore people & robots. This implicit / commonsense consensus knowledge is likely the bulk of what we know, and certainly is fundamental to our ability to communicate.

* the current nonsense about "intelligent" with current computer programs is an inexcusable marketing sin and is invariably a form paradolia.

if they did not share our "peculiarities" we would not even be able to recognize them as intelligent and certainly could not communicate with them any better than we can with an automobile, powerplant, or transistor*

That doesn't seem quite right. A 1980's automobile, powerplant, or transistor couldn't make mathematical inferences, guess what you might want to hear, then compose a novel poem which makes sense in a requested style.

the current nonsense about "intelligent" with current computer programs is an inexcusable marketing sin and is invariably a form paradolia

I don't think this comment is going to age well.

> The only justification for human spaceflight at all is that humans can fix things that a robot can't yet.

This was pre-Challenger, back then we also flew with humans because (we believed) they were more versatile and cheaper than robots.

They ultimately are, if we manage to get launch costs down. Starship is a second crack at trying to do what Shuttle failed to do with affordable space access (for both humans and payloads).

An ironic comment for someone called "Robotbeat" :-)

Robots have been traveling to Mars for over 60 years. Humans? Maybe another 60. And most of the mass sent won't even be the humans, but all the support crap they need.

And Pluto, or the heliopause? What human is going to hang out for half a century to go there?

I mean, NASA’s Artemis program is basically demonstrating all the major logistical hardware needed for a Mars mission. If it goes well, we could be looking at a lunar landing in 3 to 5 years with a vehicle about 50 times larger than the Apollo LM (and for a cost of less than a NASA Mars robotic mission—like sample return—for the lander) and possibly a Mars landing 5 years after that. Optimistic, but not absurd odds.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that we won’t be on Mars in the next 60 years.

I mean, they were. Back then, humans often outperformed machines in very rapidly evolving situations like these because there's only so much problem solving tech you can pack into 80kg.

I would actually argue that the only reason this is becoming less of a factor because just launching the experiment again is an increasingly cheap and viable option.

“If some people shouldn’t go to space nobody should go to space” is not a compelling argument against people going to space, sorry.

I'm not saying that at all. If you want to go visit space I'm all for it -- the robots can look after you. I'm interested in doing so myself.

But I don't deceive myself by claiming that there is significant scientific value beyond the self-referential "see how people survive in space." If I end up in orbit it'll be entirely for entertainment value.

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