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Comment by indoordin0saur | Hacker News Reader

I hope that when (if?) SpaceX's Starship becomes fully operational we'll get the sort of bold explorers going on their own missions at their own risk. If some wealthy young guys want to go on a mission to Mars in the same spirit as Shackleton or Darwin or Edmund Hillary I think they should be able to. Those explorers and scientists knew the great risks they were taking but chose to do it anyways because they valued furthering human achievement more than they valued their own safety. When an exploration mission's acceptable risk of death is 10% instead of 0.01% we'll see great things being accomplished.

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They went to places that, without human exploration, we couldn't know anything about.

That's just not generally true anymore. We know things about other planets in the solar system, and planets and stars elsewhere in the galaxy, and in other galaxies, without any human ever having to go to those places.

The combination of sophisticated probes and more much sensitive sensing technology has really changed the justification for human exploration, possibly so much that the justification is mostly gone.

It's always amazed me how much we can discover just by measuring the dances of distant stars.

Except that most explorers didn't go because they cared about geology; they explored because they wanted to colonize/conquer. We evolved in Africa and literally colonized (almost) every continent on Earth before we had invented writing, much less science.

The explorers that will go out into the solar system, like Jared Isaacman, will go for glory, fame, and/or profit, none of which can be gained by probes, no matter how sophisticated.

Their trips were paid for by people who expected discoveries of various kinds to yield a net win (land, minerals, food, whatever).

The explorers' dreams are of less importance than their benefactors' expectations.

Good point. But the same applies today--the benefactors like Musk, Isaacman, and Bezos all expect to gain from the exploration, maybe not in terms of money, but at least in fame, or as they put it, "advancing human achievement."

Right. But 60 years ago, putting a human on the moon was universally seen as "advancing human achievement". I would argue that right now, where we are not actually about to build a moon or Mars base, putting people out there is not widely seen as "advancing human achievement".

Sending someone to Mars without them dying (and maybe bringing them back) will be a huge step. There's so much we can do on and around Mars, however, without anyone being out there, and some of them are also likely to be huge advancements.

Similarly for the asteroid belt. Yes, it will probably need humans out there eventually, but there's a massive, massive task of mapping and exploring it that can and almost certainly will be done without launching humans into space.

You're not entirely wrong when extrapolating from historic trends up to-say- 1999. But the price of launching humans into space has gone down dramatically as is this century (to the point where privately funded LEO missions have become viable), and looks to be going down rapidly in the near future. Space flight looks like it might be entering a period akin to Moore's law in IT.

Put a handful of geologists on a Mars base with an ATV, some hammers and chisels and I'm sure they could accomplish the greatest feats of discovery in their field perhaps ever.

Note, I'm not saying that this would be easy or safe or cheap. But I am suggesting that the science achieved by getting some real scientists on Mars would be qualitatively and quantitatively greater than robotic missions.

Given that resources are always going to be limited, absolute improvements matter less than value-per-currency-unit. And the value of putting people there at this stage of the game seems quite likely to be fairly limited.

SpaceX is currently drastically reducing the price per currency unit as is, and their current prototype is intended to smash a few more price barriers; to the point where the number of probes might hit diminishing returns, and actual human scientists become affordable. We'll have to see! At any rate it seems to be becoming commercially viable, even if SpaceX aren't the ones to do it (they do have competition chasing their tails).

AFAICT, science with actual human scientists requires every piece of equipment and then some that would be on a probe.

So the cost with actual human scientists is never going to be below a probe and will realistically be significantly higher.

That means that the actual human scientists need to bring significant value to the endeavour for it to make sense.

This argument is plausible for short range so long as there's no mass produced spacecraft with a payload capacity of 100 tons and with a range to reach Mars (at a launch cost expressed in millions, not billions). I'm cautiously optimistic we'll have that capability in the next decade or so.

At the same time we don't have the ability to reach other solar systems at all, nor projected in the next few decades. So we know relatively little about them in fact. Only as much as can be obtained by remote sensing over light years. (Which is to say: not very much.)

I love this perspective! Exploration has probably never "made sense", has it?

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