Louis Friedman Says Humans Will Never Venture Beyond Mars (scientificamerican.com)

MarkWhittington writes: Dr. Louis Friedman, one of the co-founders of the Planetary Society, is coming out with a new book, "Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars," an excerpt of which was published in Scientific America. Friedman revives and revises a version of the humans vs. robots controversy that has roiled through aerospace circles for decades. Unlike previous advocates of restricting space travel to robots, such as Robert Park and the late James Van Allen, Friedman admits that humans are going to Mars to settle. But there, human space travel will end. Only robots will ever venture further.

Comments

Re:"Never" == "Life span of humankind"

[jafiwam]

Since "never" in this context is equivalent to "life span of humankind" (which is a much shorter period of time), the prediction looks more realistic.

We're working hard on erasing ourself out of existence in some not too distant future. We might even succeed at that.

Barring oddball volcanic and "rock from space" events, humankind is geared up for a long time.

What won't happen, is much more space travel.

Over the not to distant future, socialism will shut down the western producing companies (leaving no production) and space travel will stop.

Some time after (and it doesn't matter how long) collapse will be far enough that new resources will only come from dumps, and man will no longer have the ability to wage industry to build sophisticated stuff. Resources (mostly rare earth metals but also just plain rare stuff) that was easy to get will be gone, and mankind will NEVER climb back into an industrial / information age again.

Mankind will fall back into city states, goofy assed religions (even more so than now), warring over small amounts of resources, salvaging stuff from the former civilization and subsistence farming. That will go on for 100k's or millions of years until one of any number of ordinary threats (disease mostly) will knock populations down to the point they'll get wiped out by a hard winter or drought.

Our chance to get off this rock is basically almost gone, and there won't be another one.