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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

As a reminder, if a human explorer had seen this, we'd already know much, much more about it. They'd naturally take a few steps over for a closer look as soon as they saw it.

Robots are a poor substitute for humans when it comes to planetary exploration.

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A human explorer probably wouldn't have seen it though; it's really tiny. The reason this was seen at all is that the high resolution images are being looked over by a large number of people on Earth. NASA themselves didn't even spot it.

(High resolution imagery + many many human eyes) > Human eyes

Never mind that Curiosity has now been operating for 6 months without food, water, or sleep, and is expected to continue doing so for years.

It's shiny, the odds are very high that a human would indeed have seen it. For one thing, a human's eyes are constantly processing the world as they move through it. Curiosity's eyes are not.

What Curiosity has done in 6 months could have been done in a couple of weeks by a human, sleep time included. Robots are vastly inferior to humans for this work, and will remain so for some time to come.

Well, exactly because humans are not replaceable.

Nobody cares that Curiosity is not going back to earth. For an astronaut, that's different

Not to mention all the instruments in Curiosity (which not necessarily a manned mission to Mars with the intention of coming back would have)

Well, exactly because humans are not replaceable.

I think we could all agree to send Paris Hilton to Mars.

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