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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

> "Someone dying is devastating."

But it's not. We're more than happy to throw human lives at most things. Any sufficiently large civilian project (much less anything military) will have a greater-than-zero expected death toll from accidents, on-the-job medical issues, etc. And arguably this is the right way to make the omelette (although we've definitely improved in the past few decades: https://www.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolb...).

It's only when we get to space travel that we suddenly become shy about the human cost of progress. It's big and dramatic and failures are very public. Arguably we should be willing to take much greater risks at this point to establish ourselves as interplanetary.

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I think the difference is that most other things have a point other than having a human being in the scene. So if we're building an airport, a crane collapses, and workers die, we mourn and move on. (And hopefully find out what went wrong so that we don't repeat the same mistake.) And the final constructed airport has its uses, so in a morbid way, their deaths were not in vain.

On the other hand, there's no other point in human space exploration: almost anything a human being can do, a robotic probe can do far cheaper. So the point is literally to have a human being there, and having the human die there is not just a risk, it negates the entire premise of the project.

No one will plan an Olympic opening ceremony with a non-negligible chance of someone dying on stage. Why? Because the entire purpose of the Olympic is to show off your country, and if someone dies while half of the world is watching, you have failed your project. Same thing.

>almost anything a human being can do, a robotic probe can do far cheaper

... and far more inefficiently. I can't find the article right now, but a while back there was a submission on here which argued that sending robots into space instead of humans is a bit of a fallacy. Because the state of robotics and their capabilities is far from what could be achieved by sending a human. There were comparisons like the Apollo astronatus bringing back half a ton of moon rocks whereas Mars probes can only sample tiny amounts of soil. Also one of the Mars rovers (Opportunity? I can't remember the names) in its years of service only covering a few kilometers, something a human could do within a day.

EDIT: It was Opportunity and its mission lasted 15 years. Impressive nonetheless, but boy is it slow ;)

You are right but it's comparing apples to oranges. If you compared missions of comparable weight you would find that capability of robotic missions increased many times over current missions, reason is that any human mission would be much more massive than current unmanned missions. This is especially true for long range manned missions where crew needs food, water, shielding and space to survive long term in space, for a robotic mission distance is just time.

What robots cannot do well is be flexible in their mission. This is something that humans excel.

Fair point. I guess the best solution would be to just further develop both: Manned and unmanned missions.

Also I think the psychological effects of having actual humans doing this stuff on the people staying back home should not be underestimated. Would we have an Elon Musk today[0] hadn't we landed Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969?

[0]Or at least SpaceX, this guy's endeavours are all over the place :D

I'm not sure what the net tonnage of robot missions we've sent to mars to date is but that level of knowledge we've acquired is on the same order as what we'd get from a couple humans spending a week there with a bunch of tools and scientific instruments. Humans ability to improvise lets us quickly identify what is of interest and study it saving us from having to send multiple iterations of robots.

For any given fixed distance (e.g. mars) at some point there's a crossover where sending some people up there to go kick rocks is actually cheaper than sending a series of robots that kick rocks in progressively more detail. I'm not sure if we've reached that technology point yet but as space flight gets cheaper and cheaper it will eventually happen for the moon and then for mars.

Well, if we're building an airport, why not just have robots build it? By your same logic, it would be so much cheaper! No healthcare or wages or food or unions to deal with! Plus, no chance of accidental death that would make the public feel sad about that airport!

You see the fallacy in this argument yes? You're only looking at pure operating cost. Saying robots are cheaper ignores so many other factors like the insane amount of capital it would take to develop robots that could be anywhere close to as productive as a human. In addition, everything past Earth orbit is far enough away that Earth cannot make real-time decisions for you. Robots cannot make split second decisions to save themselves. Being able to think is extremely valuable is extreme environments.

Plus, this argument just plain ignores the entire point of space travel. We must permanently populate other planets or we will become extinct. Full Stop.

A bunch of robots colonizing the Galaxy cannot carry with them the light of consciousness.

Of course, the "fallacy" is that humans are actually cheaper than robots for a lot of things, when you don't have to drag a metric fuckton of gas exchangers, thermostats, pressurized suits, landers, antennae, and what not.

I thought that part was well understood.

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