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For me, at least, it's only a small part of a greater question: Why do anything that robots do better and cheaper?

It seems to me that the best thing for us as a species is to let robots that do the things robots are good at, like translating in physical space, moving objects, manipulating matter, et cetera, and let humans spend their time doing the things that humans are good at: art, culture, coming up with novel behaviors for robots.

You get excited about exploration-- that's great. I get excited about post-scarcity. Because that will mean that everyone gets to do what they're excited about.

I guess I feel that space is so huge and has so much stuff in it that any progress in exploring it brings us closer to post-scarcity, whether it's humans or robots or both. Humans on Mars will always be able to respond to things much faster than humans on Earth monitoring robots on Mars, for one.

No matter how hard they try you can't live on Mars via a robot. Ultimately it's about adventure, experience, and colonization. Robots are great for science, but there's more to space exploration than just science.

Edit: There will come a time in the near future, probably by 2050 but certainly before 2100, when the idea of "space" evaporates away. Space is just a place. Mars is just a place. It's just as much a place as the street right outside your doorway or the grocery store just down the road. It's a place we can visit, experience, and a place where we can live. Once people start living off of Earth I think that artificial barrier will come down and people will begin accepting the idea that the Earth is just a part of the Universe. We have come to split up the Universe into two parts: the Earth, and everywhere else. But this is a false dichotomy due only to the particulars of history, there is only one Universe.

They said that last century. We put a man on the moon. We haven't been back in decades, at least thirty years.

The USSR planned on sending a man to mars to live, and die there. It was feasible during the cold war, and we still haven't done anything about it.

The difference now is it is no longer just governments looking into space, but rather the private sector. That will drive things at a pace that hasn't been seen in space exploration yet (SpaceX is a great glimpse into it though!).

It's not either/or.

Research from a distance at first. Telescopes, and so on.

Send robots after that. Let them dip their toes in the water first.

Finally, send people where it makes sense.

Robots are currently unable to be autonomous in any meaningful way. They still have a limited ability to perceive because computer vision is not good yet. They lack the ability to act sensibly in novel environments. Building such robots is the holy grail of AI, and it'll take a while before they are built.

I upvoted you even though I disagree with your conclusion.

"Why do anything that robots do better and cheaper?"

That is a question that is going to be very very interesting in the rapidly approaching future. Robotics is really a game changer. It has already changed out lives for the better and will only continue to do so. The answer to "Should robots do this?" should always be a resounding "Yes.", where it serves to improve our lives.

However I refuse to continue that answer with "...and humans should not." Some of us feel comfortable that our particular niche is safe from obsolescence. What those people are good at and what they want to do happen to overlap.. at the present. But what of the people for whom that is no longer the case? Should they, in a post-scarcity society, be denied the opportunity to do what they want to do?

Let robots do what they're good at. Get to Mars, build a base, and begin mining. Then let humans do what they are good at: live.

I do not propose forbidding robots from doing anything.

I say let humans do what they are good at... and what they desire to do. If they want robots to help them or precede them, wonderful.

Yeah I was backing up your point. Robots can do almost anything, but they cannot live human lives. Let robots do the dirty, dangerous work of making Mars livable for humans, then let humans do the living.

Ah yes, exactly my thoughts then.

> It seems to me that the best thing for us as a species is to let robots that do the things robots are good at, like translating in physical space, moving objects, manipulating matter, et cetera

But I like walking around. I don't need or want a robot to do that for me. I am more than my brain; I am also my body.

Seeing just how risky the Curiosity landing was reminded me just how far away we are from landing on Mars. I now seriously doubt I'll see such a landing in the next 30-50 years.

And with respect to "we've already explored this planet, let's go to Mars" I'd offer the following: let's see someone successfully colonize the bottom of the ocean or antartica and then I'll believe we're ready to colonize Mars.

Operations in space tend to follow a pretty strict tradeoff between mass and complexity. The more mass you can throw at the problem the less complex the solutions you can come up with. In the case of the Curiosity rover the mass was constrained by the launch vehicle used (Atlas V 541) and they wanted to maximize the amount of payload dedicated to the rover systems, which resulted in the complex landing scheme. With a manned landing the system would be a lot more massive and generally far more straightforward.

With respect to the idea that we should colonize the bottom of the ocean first I'd say: why do we have to do only one or the other?

Landing the same rover using the same process on the moon would have been almost as difficult. The difficulty being in the skycrane assembly and not having the option of manual control. A manned mission would be landed more similarly to landing the Eagle on the moon, and would have the option of realtime manual landing. It wouldn't take 14 minutes for the crew to find out if it landed safely or not.

That's true, but don't forget that the skycrane was necessary because it's Mars. The atmosphere is thick enough to be a problem, but thin enough that you can't just use parachutes, and the gravity is high enough that only lightweight things can use airbags. Skycrane seems great...but even it is not good for something as heavy as a manned landing. We don't have a good way to land humans on Mars.

> We don't have a good way to land humans on Mars.

yet. Always tack on "yet." ;)

Humans have no backup. Our curiosity aside, having an extra-terrestrial colony is an excellent reason to visit Mars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

Although I would argue that Mars is a poor choice for a backup. It is fairly inhospitable and relatively close to earth. I think generation ships would be a better investment if this is our goal. Although Mars would be a good stepping stone.

How would a space vessel be more hospitable than a planet with water, a partial atmosphere, caverns below solid rock, a small magnetosheath, and 62% of Earth's gravity?

*Edit: Instead of sending tonnes of metal into Earth's orbit from Earth, would it be more efficient to set up shop on Mars? Mine Mars and build space vessels in Martian orbit. Launching materials into Martian orbit should be relatively trivial compared with Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship

The end goal of the generation ship would be to colonize a planet in a far flung solar system. I would imagine that with the number of planets in existence, we could find one that was more hospitable than mars. This would also provide a more robust 'backup' for our species, in the case that the extinction event was solar system wide.

Once again, I think Mars is a good stepping stone (for reasons that you mention), but I also imagine that a lot of the technology that would allow us to establish a sustainable colony on Mars would also allow us to develop robust generation ships.

I'm not saying we should or shouldn't go. I'm just responding the comparison that this is just like the early explorers. I don't think that is a proper comparison. The early explorers didn't have to contend with vastly different atmosphere's. Life in the New World was much like the old, with negligible differences compared to what awaits on Mars. The expense is also much, much more.

Nevertheless, I think travel to Mars is an inevitability but I think it represents a much deeper and dangerous proposition than what the early explorers had to face.

If anything I'd say exploring Mars is easier today than early exploration was.

In either case it's necessary for people to rely on technology in order to survive. In one case it's the technology of pressure hulls, electronics, CO2 scrubbers, and so on. In the other case it's the technology of boats, preserved food, hunting, weapons, etc. But as a practical matter we know that the latter technologies often failed and people died.

I think it's easy to forget just how massively daring a lot of exploration in human history has been. We know that stone age peoples who had only just recently developed the rudiments of agriculture traveled through Europe and Asia to set up colonies. Imagine what it must have been like to take your tiny stock of seeds and tools and maybe one or two families and trek through primordial forest and travel hundreds of miles before choosing to settle down. Or think about the later bouts of colonization during the bronze age. Folks in tiny boats without maps or compasses sailing across oceans (the South Pacific) or the Mediterranean and colonizing far away lands. The city of Marseilles was founded as a trading post by greeks from the coast of Turkey, 2600 years ago. That's a journey of about 2,000 miles by boat. And then imagine what it was like to explore new territory, set up lonely habitations of only a handful of humans many days walk away from any neighbors and to live in fear of bears, packs of wolves, and the violence of fellow humans.

Four thousand years ago early bronze age tribes in southeast Asia set out and colonized Indonesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar. And they did it using nothing more than outrigger canoes with crude sails.

In comparison, colonizing Mars with all of our modern technology is easy mode.

I pretty much agree with everything you say, but I would caution against thinking its too easy. This is a very hard, very expensive problem. Your other comment about mass/weight ratio is spot on. What we're lacking in space is industrial capacity. We have to build and test everything on the ground, and the it can easily get lost on the way up. Very expensive eggs in highly fragile and expensive baskets, as it were.

One thing I've not really heard talked about is orbital industry. What I envision would be factories in orbit that do everything from processing raw materials to making finished products. Typically people assume that those facilities would only support resources mined from the moon and asteroids.

But as an early step, what about just launching raw materials into orbit. Build cheap, reliable rockets. Stuff them full of cheap, bulk materials. Iron, aluminum, copper, etc. If 10% of launches fail, it's not cheap but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than losing high end equipment and people. In many cases, it might even be feasible to scavenge some of the raw materials on the ground after an accident.

This might be a good way to bootstrap a reliable orbital infrastructure. Build stuff in space so it can be cheaper, bigger, and more robust. If your ship to Mars doesn't need to land, and makes the trip many times, the lifetime cost of such vehicles drops dramatically.

It's a fairly hard problem. But on the scale of problems that have been tackled by humans in the past, say, 50 years, it's not that hard. Mostly it's just engineering.

Bootstrapping colonization is a slightly harder problem but there are some promising signs for that. First, research on reusable launch vehicles is coming along (at SpaceX for example), and if that works out it should lower launch costs by a factor of 10 to 100. Add to that the ability to use local resources on Mars and things start to get a lot easier. Within the earliest generation of manned missions to Mars we will likely have infrastructure for manufacturing rocket fuel (methane + oxygen) as well as producing building materials (concrete) and iron based materials (such as sintering iron rich regolith to manufacture rectenna arrays). That infrastructure will develop fairly rapidly and in a few years we'll start to see a real industrial and agricultural base develop on Mars. Of course the more mass we can throw at the problem early on the easier it will be to bootstrap.

One of the exciting things about Mars colonization is that it would likely serve as a proving ground for many technologies that could have applications on Earth. For example, solar power satellites are one of the best methods for providing power to a Mars base/colony. They're also one of the most promising technologies for Earth-based power generation, but the barrier to entry and the perceived financial risk has been too high.

I think this post is an odd response and just proves my point. Most of this is an appeal to how amazing ancient people were. That's great. They were.

You claim stone age people did a lot of exploration .... But yet you say early exploration was harder than Mars exploration. I find this humorous.

Stone age people could never explore Mars, we can explore Europe and Asia just fine. Which one is more difficult? I'm being serious ... You could say "oh but it was hard because they were stone age" or whatever, but the fact is, though it was hard, it was not so hard that it huge economic factors, advanced life support, contend with temperatures very extreme, etc, etc. When you say "it was amazing what they did in the bronze age with just sails," I say "Yes it was amazing and all they really needed was sails." Well, it's going to take much more than sails to explore Mars.

It is just an entirely different thing. It doesn't seem like a very controversial view.

I would suggest that there is some hindsight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight) creeping in to your statement. Using your example of the new world, explorers had to at least deal with ocean voyages, new diseases, and possibly dangerous flora and fauna. All of these dangers were unknown until they were known. In the same vein, the dangers of a "vastly different atmosphere" were unknown, but are now know via experiments in deep sea diving, not to mention going to the moon. Death via exploration in a new environment (ocean, deep earth, space, etc) is certainly not a new risk. Looking back from this point in time in history, it is easy to suggest that those risks were minimal.

No there is no hindsight, it's just obvious.

Your examples are not very good comparisons. We can't breath Martian air, temperatures are extreme, radiation, etc, etc.

This is vastly different from "Oh, that's a strange plant" or scurvy or whatever you're coming up with.

Deep ocean exploration is an interesting point, we haven't really done much of that and I promise you Hernando Cortez didn't either.

The fact is, comparison to early explorers is misplaced, at least as put in what I responded to. I mean it's sort of funny. The explorers were going places that humans already lives. The inhabitants were more impacted than the explorers. I can poke holes in this all day. No hindsight, just common sense. :)

Exactly.

Same argument applies for life extension, or any other radical change like that. Nobody forces you to follow in the wake of the pioneers. You can always just stay behind.

You got it perfectly. I want to go for the experience and opportunity. But I also want to build something for the future. No one remembers the people that stay behind and live out their lives, but the names and deeds of the founders of Pensacola, St. Augustine, and Jamestown are taught and remembered.

Another reason to settle other places in the solar system is that we can do so without guilt. In America, we have remember the atrocities commited during the building of the USA. On Mars, the moon, and anywhere else it's all fresh and no one is there.

I don't have my own family yet, so the idea of literally building a new world where my kids and grandkids grow and thrive has a strong attraction too. Maybe they would hate that they were born on Mars with little or no chance of returning to Earth, but I have to hope that they see it as their world and their future.

When I went to sleep after the Curiosity landing, I had a dream that I was on Mars with a group of colonists. I "overheard" someone say "this is the first child born outside of Earth". Imagining someone who is a citizen (by virtue of their parents) of a country they've never seen, on a planet they've never visited... I woke up in wonderment that this is going to happen some day. I hope I'm around to see it.

I hope it's your kid or mine. That's a great, great dream.

Born on Mars? Come on, we MIGHT be able to put a man on the Mars in 15 years, colonizing it so that your kids can be born there is far away.

You're quite right. But in the past pioneers didn't expect me to pay for their adventures through taxation. I'm all for colonizing mars when we have the technology to do so, but we don't and we won't for hundreds of years. There's no reason to send people there now.

> But in the past pioneers didn't expect me to pay for their adventures through taxation.

Last time I checked SpaceX was a private company, either profitable already, or on track to become so pretty soon.

And even if you were talking about the NASA mission, I'm still all for it, no matter what Zombie Ayn Rand is mumbling in the basement.

>Last time I checked SpaceX was a private company, either profitable already, or on track to become so pretty soon.

SpaceX is a private company, sure, but so is Boeing. Much of the funding for their current activities comes from NASA. The easiest business in the world to be profitable in is government contracting.

>And even if you were talking about the NASA mission, I'm still all for it, no matter what Zombie Ayn Rand is mumbling in the basement.

Great. Why don't you pay for it then, and leave the rest of us out? There isn't any reason to send people to Mars, and the effort will cost over a trillion. It's hard to imagine a use for that money that wouldn't be more productive.

Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh pitching to bankers in the movie "Spirit of St Louis:" "We have to know...We have to try."

I would also point out that when people did first start exploring our own world, it was fraught with peril. Many died as they settled new areas and explored.

So, obviously we see what happened as we explored our own world and some of the benefits it has reaped (opening up new resources, etc.). So why WOULDN'T we want to explore other worlds?

Your argument is illogical. From "exploration is desirable" you conclude "humans should explore"; but this doesn't refute "humans should explore using robots as sensory extensions" like you imply in your first paragraph.

"Okay, but I'm not paying for it."

Assuming you're referencing things like this being funded by taxes, that's not really how it works.

If everyone were always given the option to decide not to pay for things, what do you think the current state of society would be?