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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be that guy, again, but I still feel like I haven't seen a very clear explanation of why this is a good idea. It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to humanity?

Especially in light of Curiosity, why is it assumed that the logical next step after sending a robotic lab is to send a person, rather than sending a few dozen more robots? For a fraction of the cost of sustaining human life on another planet, we could construct a huge automated research complex capable of doing everything a human would want to do -- even golf -- and that would be valuable research toward developing the fully-autonomous robotic scientists which are definitely the only way we're going to have real long-term exploration of the outer solar system and beyond.

Basically, I can understand why someone might want to go to Mars, but I'm not sure why someone else would want to send them.

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Ah what is the value to humanity? What is the value to humanity of a stadium, of the Olympics, of a monument, of a great piece of art or a beautiful performance? What is the value to humanity of entertaining blockbuster movies, fun video games, comics and science fiction?

What is the value to humanity of inspiration?

Right now science is held almost in contempt, all its wonders are subtle - appreciable only to the trained mind. Such an accomplishment would be large and obvious. The peripheral effect in inspiring young minds cannot be overestimated. One of those may one day go on to develop powerful DNA repair mechanisms because their imagination was captured at a young age by space travel and wanted to do something useful to that. Let alone the boon to cancers.

They want to travel to and live on another planet with low gravity and scant atmosphere. How could they possibly do that without spurring the invention of a lot of amazing things as a side-effect?

I've mentioned my hypothesis that it would have positive effects on geopolitics by making it possible to view Earth as a locality. But.

Most of all it would at once be an incredible piece of science and the greatest piece of art ever created. For what is art but a celebration of humanity and human ability?

The medical field is replete with examples of clinically-beneficial products that would never have existed without fundamental 'basic science' research that was, at one point, 'frivolous' and without a clear benefit.

Consider the frailty of our planet. The speck of dust that it is compared to the depths of the universe. If we don't start colonizing other planets, and gain the experience on how to do so, we'll essentially become extinct quite rapidly.

Forget the robots. We need the experience in sending actual humans there. This has to happen sooner or later if we want to ensure that our race lives on, after our planet becomes inhabitable.

With all this in mind, it's better to do this sooner rather than later. And why not start in 12-15 years? I hope you can see the value now.

The experience is not only necessary for survival, but also will lead to new opportunities. Once there is a market for interplanetary transport, experience will lead to innovations that we can't think of today. One huge example that is already being explored is asteroid mining. Add the business case to the point you made about our species becoming more resilient by turning multi-planetary, and there the case for Mars is strong.

I think the best reason for wanting to do this is that the rover's top speed is around 2in / second, it requires significant man power on the earth to drive/control, and they have a limited toolset with few ways to augment what it starts with. Over the course of 6 years the two rovers had only covered 13 miles collectively.

All of these things can be overcome with time, money, science, engineering, etc.

In the short term, for a relatively large amount of money -OR- the acceptance of deaths, we can put a human on that same surface who can cover miles per day, autonomously explore and discover, use new tools as soon as they arrive, can deal with unexpected circumstances, and make suggestions about what would be useful to have to do more science/work.

All that said - it is hard issue and I think it more likely a commercial effort will send a human before the government.

> It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to humanity?

Survival. We will go extinct at some point if we stay on Earth. The more spread out we are, the less likely any single catastrophe is to wipe out the entire race.

In the more near term... Do we really need more motivation than "because it's there"?

Yes, but not in the next twenty years. Or the next hundred years. Or the next thousand years.

A nuclear holocaust would not kill all the humans. A major asteroid strike would not kill all the humans. A super-flu pandemic would not kill all the humans. A single short circuit, puncture, or virus could kill all the humans on Mars.

The Earth is the perfect place for humans to live, out of the entire universe. If we can't figure out how to survive long-term on this planet, that's why we'll go extinct.

"Because it's there" is a great reason for an explorer to want to go somewhere. But that doesn't automatically have value for the future of humanity.

> A nuclear holocaust would not kill all the humans. A major asteroid strike would not kill all the humans. A super-flu pandemic would not kill all the humans. A single short circuit, puncture, or virus could kill all the humans on Mars.

Terraforming Mars would prevent a 'puncture' or 'short circuit' from wiping out its population. The goal isn't to only spread human life but all of life.

Terraforming Mars is a great long-term goal. But I don't see how putting a human being on the surface of the planet gets us there any faster.

You don't? That assumption is extremely obvious to me. Most people don't care about Mars right now - in fact, most Americans are against space travel because they think it's expensive. So, terraforming Mars is seen by people (including those with money) as ridiculous. But if SpaceX puts a team on Mars for less money than, say, making a blockbuster film, an obvious result is massive increase in space travel, colonization, etc.

Progress is progress. Choosing to make progress accelerates the process, especially when the progress we're talking about would be the first humans on another planet (and the first known life on Mars).

Motivation.

Motivation and inspiration.

Since you seem big on humans being good at art and culture, consider it the most impressive and daring pieces of performance art ever attempted.

I imagine explorers like Columbus heard many of the same arguments.

And if Mars had an oxygen atmosphere, protection from solar radiation, a fully self-sustaining human-compatible ecology and a number of extant human civilizations that might be relevant somehow.

The risk of death was very real for the explorers of past.

> Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.

Dead is dead, whether it is by the hands of a vacuum or starvation in the bitter cold.

Earth stops being perfect after a rock hits us. This has apparently already happened more than once, and there's no assurance a breeding population would survive. I agree wiping ourselves out is currently the largest risk, but in the limit, we can always make redundancy with uncorrelated failure modes less risky than a single point of failure.

Who is "we" exactly? Go back in time far enough and you will find your ancestors are of a different species. So why are we throwing a pass to some future "alien" species? Is this some sort of cosmic chain letter we just received?

The arguments I hear on this subject really sound more like a guy talking himself into buying that Porsche (or Tesla!) than anything else.

Keep sending the robots!

You could use the same logic to justify wrecking the environment.

Not really. I am expecting my grandkids to still be the same species.

How many generations in the future does it take before you cut off your compassion?

Let's see. 1 generation => Lots of compassion. 6 billion years => no compassion. So somewhere in between. How about you?

...I am not sure where you are getting such massive numbers from. Modified gamblers fallacy?

OK I'll bite. What's your number?

You appear to be missing my point. I am not criticizing your lack of apathy for people in the absurdly distant future. Rather I am puzzled that you are even thinking along those lines.

acomar was discussing extinction events and you seem relate that to billions of years in the future. I find that rather incredibly odd. Is it optimism?

> Survival. We will go extinct at some point if we stay on Earth. The more spread out we are, the less likely any single catastrophe is to wipe out the entire race.

Indeed. Think of it as a really good remote backup plan. Colonizing another solar system would be an even better one.

Elon Musk does not want to just send someone over on a holiday -- the stated goal of SpaceX is to put a permanent, self-sufficient colony of people on Mars.

So my proposal is this: Spend a lot less money building a much larger, much more durable self-sufficient colony of robots. Once that's going good and strong, maybe we program the robots to produce the oxygen and water and complex organic molecules and radioactive shielding we need in a reliable enough way that it's worth sending people. If that all doesn't quite work out, well, we still got a self-sufficient colony of robots.

We can't even put a self-sufficient colony of people in Antarctica, where we don't have to worry about the lack of atmosphere or radiation shielding.

No, we haven't attempted to put a self-sufficient colony of people in Antarctica. Which is not at all the same as "we can't".

Right. We attempted to put a self-sufficient colony in the American Southwest and still failed.

Surely it's fair to extrapolate our inability to succeed there into an inability to succeed in a far more harsh and remote locale.

Keep in mind that this isn't to say we could never succeed. Just that this is a very, very difficult problem that we don't even talk about seriously today, let alone study and pursue. Yet everyone just assumes it's somehow trivial and automatic once we decide to try.

Assuming you're talking about Biosphere 2, do you know why it didn't succeed?

What problem did it have that is unsolvable?

Pauly Shore.

Antarctic colonies haven't needed to be self-sufficient, given the relative ease of resupply, so they haven't been.

"For a fraction of the cost of sustaining human life on another planet, we could construct a huge automated research complex capable of doing everything a human would want to do"

No, we couldn't.

It's a common refrain, but there's no evidence of it. Where on Earth are these robots that are as productive as humans?

They simply do not exist.

Humans on Earth are (still) cheaper than robots for almost any task.

You'll find those productive robots in every modern factory in the world, building everything from cars to candy more efficiently than humans.

> You'll find those productive robots in every modern factory in the world, building everything from cars to candy more efficiently than humans.

Doing one pre-programmed thing, and they they can't automatically adjust the feed rate as the drill bit wears down, or pick up the bit they drop when their suction pump jams, or change their own electrodes when their spot weld quality drops.

Automated factories take vast human effort to set up and are extraordinarily sensitive (i.e. prone to breaking) to unexpected inputs or deviations in operating environments.

This is not a good line of reasoning when arguing for their suitability for exploring an unknown planet, though I appreciate you might just be specifically addressing your parent's point.

> what's the ultimate value to humanity?

What if we found a bacteria that would spread on Mars and create an atmosphere? There are so many questions like that. Science for science sake, art for arts, because dammit, we are alive!

Why don't we better terraform the sahara desert or the death valley? Greenland? Australia's outback? Antarctica?

Honest question.

Conservation I guess. And cheap existing land.

Simpler explanation: Because we can't.

As Neil Tyson says, we can't even accurately predict the weather a week down the road, you want to terraform something?

Of course, he also says that humans have had a preventable effect on Earth's climate.

> As Neil Tyson says, we can't even accurately predict the weather a week down the road, you want to terraform something?

Did he really say that? I'd think NDT would be acutely aware of the difference between short-term weather and long-term climate, given that he gets to fight climate change denialists using that absurd misunderstanding on a regular basis.

He is, and he did:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ngd5e/i_am_neil_degras...

A: terraforming is slow, but we're trying -- see the Sahara Forest Project

B: the Sahara desert is the biggest rain-shadow in the world. It's between the Atlas Mountains in Morrocco on the north, the Cameroon volcano chain in the southeast, and the Red Sea hills to the northeast. To make things worse, the year-round trade winds prevent Atlantic storm systems from going aground in Africa -- instead we get a hurricane season in Florida. The result is a magical place where it never rains:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MeanMonthlyP.gif

While we're at it, why don't we first not make a giant mess of the habitable and productive parts of the earth that we depend on?

We're doing science. There's a whole science lab on Mars, right now, rolling around doing science. That's super valuable. What does it need a human for?

Because this is what humanity does.

> We're doing science. There's a whole science lab on Mars, right now, rolling around doing science. That's super valuable. What does it need a human for?

Digging deeper than five inches?

Sending humans is an intrinsic goal, worth accomplishing for itself. It's like producing a great work of art.

(You're wrong to think that the robotic missions can be justified instrumentally. The science being done by Curiosity is kinda interesting, but it's hardly $2.5 billion worth of interesting. We could do much more important science on Earth with that money.)

Especially in light of Curiosity, why is it assumed that the logical next step after sending a robotic lab is to send a person, rather than sending a few dozen more robots?

Why not both? Humans are infinitely more versatile than a robot, unless of course, you build the robotic equivalent of a human being.

> what's the ultimate value to humanity?

Humanity is like a software that's currently sitting on a single hard-drive. There is no backup. The clock is ticking.

"It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to humanity?"

If you realize that our destiny on this planet is to be wiped out then it seems prudent to be able to leave it and live elsewhere nearby. Sure there have been 5 mass extinctions and hundreds of smaller ones, not to mention almost doing ourselves in in the 60's over Cuba or perhaps in future due to climate change.

"It'd be a great tourism experience, but what's the ultimate value to humanity?"

Developing the future technology to accomplish this feat would be worth it already. Furthermore, being the first company/country to send a human to Mars would be an enormous achievement. The number of people this would inspire to pursue this field in our current and future generations is not something that can be measured.

the best reason I can come up with is meteors. and although taking the michael bay movie armageddon as a reference seems kinda unscientific, it's still an actual (although quite unlikely) threat. I think of mars as a backup in case something terrible happens to earth.

Btw. the video in the report mentions Elon Musk designing the rocket himself, I assume that's BS?

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