Comment by zoeysmithe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zoeysmithe | Hacker News Reader

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Its incredible to me that educated adults are taking long-distance manned space travel seriously. Its comically absurd and Dr. Strangelovian that people are floating "Send old people who will probably die soon" as a viable fix.

This is a job for robots and especially with new AI advances. Trying to fit the biology evolution created for Earth for non-Earth places is a classic square peg problem. I've always sort of mused that the 'gray alien' body is some sort of collective mythical idea of a space-engineered body. That is to say, if you want biological beings to casually work on other planets and moons, our Mark I primate bodies aren't good enough. Ethically, breeding 'space body children' should be a no-go for any civilization that values ethics and consent.

So that just leaves us robots, which not only makes scientific sense but ethical sense. Even the "old man" solution is unethical. We cannot know which one of these men might live to 100 if not bathed in radiation. Estimates on average age don't apply to the individual, so sending a 70 year old who will "die anyway in his 80s" is still very problematic. Fun fact, William Shatner is 92, so the famous Captain Kirk actor is one of those long lived individuals. Imagine sending him to Mars in 2004 at 72 because "he'll die soon anyway," but instead he's starting to look like someone who is going to live well into his mid or late 90s.

Its probably worth mentioning that when humanity does figure out a cheap and safe flight to places like Mars, Venus, moons of Jupiter, etc and figures out the engineering and bioengineering, we'll probably either be at our extinction event before then or AI will be at the level where we'd be just as much machine as human, or entirely replace by self-aware robots. So its a bit like those old film strips where they launch a manned cannon ball to the moon or an airship to go to Venus. The society, tech, and culture, etc of the time just wasn't far-seeing enough to understand the complexity of these issues and the changes needed to address them. We never danced around the moon's surface in Victorian gowns, used a sextant to navigate our spaceship, or brought a contingent of slaves to Mars. Modern thinkers are making similar mistakes as these naive old stories. Migration to the stars is just not going to be done in these bodies nor with this technology.

You’d find thousands of volunteers of any age for a manned mission to Mars, even if it were one way. I don’t think it’s unethical to let informed people risk their life

We'd find thousands of "volunteers" for blood sports, but we disallow them. Letting misguided people, the poor, the unwell, etc sign up for capitalist-backed suicide ventures is extremely unethical.

Once allowed, the corrupting influence of money would take over. People would be guilted into this by family for sponserships and such.

Not that long ago a woman received a huge forehead tattoo for an online casino as a PR stunt. They paid hew a few thousand for this stunt. She said she needed the money for her kids.

I don't think you're fully understanding how many desperate people out there would sign up for this or be forced into this against their will under the dishonest guise of "volunteering."

Look at the near revolt of the early space programs for example both Soviet and Western, with astronauts and engineers demanding safety measures and more personal control of the spacecraft after high profile "dog eat dog" philosophy failures that killed and injured many. We've already been through this. It doesn't work.

Lastly, a lot of engineers might walk away from the job for ethical concerns because they dont want to build suicide machines. Look at how MD's refuse to be part of state executions in the USA, thus leaving a cottage industry of a fairly incompetent execution industry. Your best people would walk away from SpaceX, Boeing, etc if tasked with making suicide machines for vulnerable people. People have ethics and not all subscribe to bottom-tier "dog eat dog" capitalism "volunteerism," but instead are educated to know what that means and how that's historically abused our most vulnerable.

Our most vulnerable populations wouldn't be of any interest as crew members of a spacecraft. They're the ones who wouldn't get to go at all.

The point of a crew wouldn't be to demonstrate human safety, but rather to do things automation can't currently do (e.g. improvise solutions based on a deep and broad background of general knowledge + specific training coupled with high basic intellect, in austere environments under great personal stress). People like that don't get their foreheads tattooed for money.

>Not that long ago a woman received a huge forehead tattoo for an online casino as a PR stunt. They paid hew a few thousand for this stunt. She said she needed the money for her kids.

Would her kids have been better off if she couldn't get that money?

We have for example test pilots who take high risks for their job without the slippery slope problems you describe so I don’t think that doing something similar for a Mars mission is impossible.

I think there's a fundamental difference in what people and society allow between these two scenarios:

1. There are jobs that are risky.

2. When your air runs out at Mars take this suicide pill because we're not funding a round trip.

The latter is a huge deviation from what is acceptable.

> a huge deviation from what is acceptable.

The question is acceptable to whom. There are pastimes that are risky such as rock climbing, Formula 1 racing, and many others. Would you ban those too? If not then you must accept that there are degrees of risk that are acceptable to some and not to others. Assuming that the decision is genuinely made without any kind of coercion why should society dictate what risks people can take?

As has been pointed out elsewhere on this topic the poor and ill educated won't be offered these opportunities anyway so that kind of implicit coercion does not apply.

> you must accept that there are degrees of risk that are acceptable to some and not to others

Someone who accepts the 'risk' of certain death on the mission doesn't seem to me to be the sort of person you want as your companion on a dangerous voyage. And if you're planning to found a colony, you want all sorts; not just nerds, scientists and technicians.

> Someone who accepts the 'risk' of certain death on the mission doesn't seem to me to be the sort of person you want as your companion on a dangerous voyage.

That is EXACTLY the person I want around, because I know they can be relied on even in dangerous situations. You, on the other hand, who thinks that someone who does not fear death would be a bad companion on such a mission, would likely piss himself in face of actual danger.

Someone who's afraid of death on a suicide mission is a danger to the mission and, thus, to myself. When you want to found a colony, you need strong men and smart men, best when each man covers both.

You definitely just want nerds, scientists, doctors and technicians, because they get the shit done.

This isn't a hollywood movie.

> because I know they can be relied on even in dangerous situations

Why do you think such people are reliable?

For clarity, I'm not afraid to die. For exactly that reason, I think I'd be an unreliable companion on a dangerous mission. For my companion, I'd want someone who thought they had at at least as much to lose as me. If you want to head off to Mars with Rambo at the controls, that's up to you.

If you want to found a colony that is all scientists and technicians, because you don't think ordinary people "get things done", good luck with your colony. Pumping sewage, helping people in mental distress? Sure, leave it all to technicians; after all, we'll filter them for mentail susceptibility before they leave. We're good at finding nutters before they go nuts, aren't we? Well, no.

<Its incredible to me that educated adults are taking long-distance manned space travel seriously>

Comical and Strangelovian perhaps, but also the only hope for humankind. How many years until the expanding sun's corona envelops the earth? Assuming we make it that long without first destroying ourselves or meeting an unfriendly asteroid, you can bet that all of humanity will be behind the effort. So while it's not on this week's scrum board, it's definitely a high-priority TODO.

> but also the only hope for humankind

You make it sound as if humankind is doomed if we don't do it. But we're doomed anyway; no species on Earth has survived more than a coupla hundred thousand years without evolving into something else.

I think there's a desperate desire to live forever, behind some of the speculation about long-distance manned space-travel. Hey, guys, it's like this: you ain't gonna live forever. You won't be able to orbit Alpha Centauri, let alone colonize the galaxy.

100 years ago, we weren't at all sure that the Milky Way wasn't the same as the Universe. As we learn of faraway places, naturally we dream of visiting them; but now we know for sure that there are places we can see, that definitely can't be visited. We'll get over these dreams eventually, and maybe realize that we have to take due care of our home planet, and try to avoid killing one another in wars. Those are the great threats to 'hope', and the idea of survival through space-travel is a distraction for people who aren't prepared to face that fact.

> How many years until the expanding sun's corona envelops the earth?

So, so, so many years. We've gotten as far as we have in something like 200,000 years, with most of our technological advancement happening in the last...I don't know, let's be generous and call it 10,000.

It takes probably what, two hundred years for technology to become nearly unrecognizably advanced these days?

We have around 7 and a half billion years before the sun wipes us out. Trying to get people on Mars with current technology has its arguments, but that we'll run out of time if we put it off anymore isn't one of them.

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