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Comment by BerislavLopac | Hacker News Reader

> Habitats (we gotta live)

Why exactly do we need to live in space at all? Can't we send more or less autonomous spacecraft to retrieve the resources, and stay safely here on Earth?

I mean - we extract oil from under the sea without having to move to underwater habitats, don't we?

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Maintenance is always done on site. Do you think the workers on oil rigs take a commute to land every night? No, so people are going to need to live in space to solve problems in space.

Maintenance can be done by robots. Unlike on oil platforms, there is no free air in space.

Until a general purpose robot that can do all the things a human can do is developed and can be more cheaply deployed than a human, a human's gonna do it instead.

That is true. But keep in mind two things: first, the robot does not have to be fully autonomous, and second, maintaining a human in space is so expensive that we already have such robots. Just look at Curiosity and its cousins.

I don't think Curiosity and its cousins can tighten down leaky bolts on pipe connections, which is what I think of when the term "maintenance" comes up. The closest we have right now in that vicinity is Spot from Boston Dynamics, and it basically only acts as a universal monitoring tool to go yell at a human to fix things.

I guess what I'm saying is that robots can identify problem points, but at the current time can't actually troubleshoot or resolve those problems. Those are really difficult problems to solve.

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