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Robots Will Pave the Way To Mars
szotz (2505808) writes "There's a lot of skepticism swirling around NASA's plan to send humans to Mars in the 2030's, not to mention all those private missions. If we want to have sustainable (read: not bank-breaking) space exploration, the argument goes, there's no way we can do it the way we've been going to the moon and low-Earth orbit. We have to find a way to exploit space resources and cut down on the amount of stuff we need to launch from Earth. That's not a new idea. But this article in IEEE Spectrum suggests research on resource extraction and fabrication in low and zero gravity might actually be making progress...and that we could take these technologies quite far if we get our act together."
Isnt it pretty obvious to send an automated system to prepare a safe habitat anyway?
Oh, come now, surely the fact that ordering replacement laborers would take (given historical mission data, as a rough guide) at least 100 days, quite possibly two or three times that, and cost tens of millions of dollars a head (very optimistic figure) doesn't change the viability of using humans to do dangerous construction and heavy industrial jobs, does it?
Now they want to send Wally to Mars?
I don't think I would enjoy the drive.
No problem. We'll do the hard work and 'pave the way'. But if you meatbags expect us to hold the camera when you arrive like MacArthur at Leyte, you're out of your fscking minds.
Have gnu, will travel.
To the stars through asteroids... we need to bring them close enough from here to move manufacturing to the space. It will take quite a bit of investment, but once we get there we can go to mars and the rest of the solar system way far cheaper, and probably will bring more than enough benefits down here, both for the developed technologies to make it viable, and the things and materials that could be manufactured/acquired that way. It is just an investment, just the kind of things that make the banks live.
Of course, bringing asteroids large enough (i.e. of the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs) to be profitable close enough to earth could trouble a lot of people.
Actually - religion seems to me to be more of an anchor to earth, than a reason to go off planet. Your religious nuts are more likely to argue, "If God wanted us in space, he would have PUT US IN SPACE!"
As for getting out act together - I'm sure that will impress the next big rock scheduled to strike the earth. "Hey, those humans have gotten their act together! Maybe I'll just nudge myself into a near miss orbit, instead of obliterating life on earth!"
So, tell us, which religion do you subscribe to? Sounds a bit like humanism. Basically, you believe that if we can all just get along, then everything will work out for the best, right?
Screw that, Pal. Bad things happen to good people. Most religions admit that much - yours seems to be pretty screwed up.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Personally I welcome all our robot overlords who buggered off to mars. Oh wait.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Research in robotics is especially useful because it has direct applications here on Earth, which makes it more likely to attract private investment and increases the likelihood of being able to spin off space tech for consumer purposes.
Maybe in the future we'll be able to build robots using off-the-shelf parts to do boring, dangerous tasks here on Earth, and use slightly more robust versions (still made of mostly off-the-shelf parts) on Mars without spending billions on R&D.
The easiest way to build billions of affordable robots is to have a dozen of them in every home. I'm still waiting for a robot personal chef, dammit!
Why does it seem that no one on ./ has a sense of humor?
"Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race." -Albert Einstein
It's hotter on Mars.
"Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race." -Albert Einstein
The appropriate way to get our act together is for the President to set a goal, give money and step the fuck away from NASA. We went to the moon with slide rules. In the era where a smartphone has more computing power than an entire Lunar Module, times 10, we are paying the Russians to send us to Low Earth Orbit. I'm not a proponent of human mission to Mars. The trip means little other than felling-good-about-my-country and flag planting. Send a robot there and we don't have to worry about a return trip, always harder than departure.
that's quite an absurd concept you have, that climate change would cause the loss of Earth's human population. not even remotely possible. did Al Gore put that idea in your head? here's a hint, he's a liar, sensationalist and a whackjob. Also a rich hypocrite with twenty times your family's carbon footprint.
We made it for months on submarines, underwater, day and night...months at a time. We made our own air and water from the ocean. So yes, find the resources along the way and Mars is not far at all. Robots? They will help, they are not the sole answer.
It's hotter on Mars.
If by "hot" you mean "freezing fucking cold" then yeah it is.
We've to build robots (space dock, new type of engine, new rad hardening, etc) first - these myths have long been debunked by Robert Zubrin. It's the never-ending process of getting ready that the space industry earns the Benjamins from, not the flight itself.
From the article:
Thatâ(TM)s the scenario laid out some 35 years ago by a team of academics and NASA engineers meeting at the University of Santa Clara, in California.
There were still AI people talking this up when I was at Stanford CS in the 1980s. They wanted to have self-replicating robots on the Moon or Mars by 2000. I asked "how soon could you have it working in Arizona?" Some people didn't like that.
It's embarrassing how bad robot manipulation is in unstructured situations. DARPA is trying to fix that by throwing money at the DARPA Humanoid Challenge. But so far, the machines in that are mostly teleoperated. (Ignore the edited videos for popular consumption; look at the split-screen videos that show three views of the machine and one of the operators, who often are using game controllers.)
I'd like to see a robotic system able to do simple parts changes on a car - air filter, fuel filter, spark plugs, etc., removing and replacing any covers and cables needed to do the job.
Research on those things never has been the problem. The problem is that it's going to be extraordinarily expensive to get and maintain all that resource extraction and exploitation infrastructure on stream. The only way to "save" money is to a) treat the costs as sunk costs and thus not apply them to missions flown, or b)... there really isn't a "b". (Unless you fly a sufficiently large number of missions frequently enough that said costs become a minor component of the overhead - which really isn't "sustainable" because it doesn't create any savings because of the high total costs of all those missions.)
one of the more depressing things is that no one is building a von neumann machine.
We have at least one of these already... the total human industrial complex on earth is of course capable of replicating itself.
The problem is that its dispersed, poorly organized, designed more for production efficiency and capacity then for space/mass efficiency... etc.
If you started out with one large warehouse and started putting at least one of every factory machine in existence... and then started combining them where they do similar things that can be tweaked so one machine does two roles... and then started miniaturizing them so you could squeeze the whole thing down. The point is that you should be able to fit a machine that can replicate itself and all human industry into a launchable package.
Consider that everything we have was made with these soft clumsy hands. Everything we have comes from those hands making tools, which made tools, which made tools, which make everything.
So we need to make something that can do that on mars or the moon or anywhere. Ideally not soft organic hands... those work on earth where our biosphere supports our life... but on other worlds you're going to need robots. And if you're building robots you might as well make the robots more specialized so you can skip a few steps.
We should have already done this... launch a package at the moon and mars... and then just have the robots dig in and start building an industrial infrastructure.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
What about using some brave, stupid, and disposable Kerbals?
If, however, you are betting the light bill money on the outcome, consider that it is takeout orders of magnitude more plausible the moderator posted later in this thread.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
To take the opposing attitude, if God meant for us to stay on Earth, why did He make all the other planets? Is he running experiments around other stars as well? Did Jazeb have his gas sacs rent for all the martian's sins?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Take the British Empire. Please. They basically colonized America and Australia with folks they didn't want who didn't want to be there.
Human life is not so different from all other earthly life, in that it usually seeks to expand its environment during times of strife, resource shortage, and unpleasantness.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Very few of us can truly laugh at ourselves, even though the one's who can seem to have the very best sense of humor.
And your nigger jokes aren't funny.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I suspect that the big difference is shipping cost: It's not polite to say so; but humans are dirt cheap (if they were in some sort of scarcity, we'd bother to save the starving ones). Just to get them to earth orbit (and I think this is the LEO figure, not geostationary) is north of $4,000/kg. Human transport to Mars is still a somewhat speculative number; but will certainly be substantially greater than that (and the traveller will consumer many more kg of food/oxygen/etc, so total cost will be higher still).
That isn't a situation where you bother to send the dregs, anybody plunked on another planet will probably be worth their weight in gold by the time they get there, so they might as well be the most competent people you can get.
Weird, 30 minutes ago that comment had a moderation, now it has none. Does that happen often or only to posts that go against the Holy Orthodoxy Of The Species' True Destiny In Space, Amen?
Or it could be that the Slashdot servers are out of sync.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The truth is, we have given very little thought to what traits would be selected for in a hostile, alien environment. There would likely be catastrophic loss of life while we were navigating the learning curve to a life on Mars, let alone a venture outside our solar system.
Maybe our best and brightest will be interpreting data and making corrections while the adventurers sort things out.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I like how you're thinking. I'm trying to remember a story - I've read so damned many - there was a planet, could have even been Mars, where they kept the public away because they found God's thumbprint on it. Kinda crazy that I can't even remember the title or author, but the idea has come back to me from time to time. Anyway, yeah, in theory God is experimenting with a zillion other life forms on a whole bunch of other planets, and it would be presumptuous of us to go out and meddle with his other stuff. Or - - - maybe it wouldn't be presumptuous, either. Maybe THAT IS the experiment, to see which one of the experiments gets off whichever stupid rock it was first developed on!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The truth is, we have given very little thought to what traits would be selected for in a hostile, alien environment.
We haven't put a lot of thought into it because it doesn't require much. Any corporation's HR department is already well-equipped to draft requirements for that kind of position: 15-20 years of experience building and maintaining extraterrestrial habitats, and able to make solid decisions and perform under intense pressure (or an increasing lack thereof).
Mod points can't be changed, only deleted. Could be somebody accidentally down-modded somewhere else in this discussion, and posted with their real uid to undo the mistake. If they had previously up-modded the parent, that mod point would be gone now too.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
If you're not familiar with potholer54 you should check out his videos on climate change. He cuts through the BS/hype on both sides of the issue, and is reasonably amusing too. Very worth the time.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
And they want their newspaper headlines back.
Not going to happen.
The distance between Earth and Mars varies widely and Pavement is rigid and non flexible.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.