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> It's about building and living in habitats beyond low orbit And what for if I may ask? And please don't say "technological development" or "colonizing space

> It's about building and living in habitats beyond low orbit And what for if I may ask? And please don't say "technological development" or "colonizing space". ad Development): Most of the tech that needs to be developed for this, is what is commonly called space plumbing: Figuring out ways to make human bodily functions not immediately fail in space. Next to none of these technologies benefit humanity at large in any way. Also: We keep coming up with amazing new tech all the time, without the extra cost of strapping it to a human and shooting that package into orbit. ad Colonization): There is nothing in our solar system to colonize. Period. Everything other than Earth is less hospitable than Earth would be after a thermonuclear war, by a huge margin. Terraforming another planet is practically impossible fora species that still has to count the kilos for every launch. And as for the one goal that makes sense, which is exploration: We have a perfectly reliable form of space exploration: Robots. And they are much better at it than we are, for one simple reason: They don't require space plumbing. There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar Roving vehicle.

lupusreal 2y ago
> There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar Roving vehicle. The Soviet Union did send a rover. Anyway, the science wasn't worth it and the project was driven by romantics who thought that it was the duty of mankind to explore. Putting men on the Moon was the real point of it.
jwells89 2y ago
Long-term habitation of surfaces of bodies other than that of Earth is a stepping stone to being able to live in space long term in very large, permanently spaceborne crafts. It’s easier to develop these things on the moon, mars, etc because of immediate access to materials that’d need to be launched into orbit otherwise. In the long term, it may make sense to build shipyards on the moon, on Mars, or somewhere in the asteroid belt where large ships can be built and launched without having to fight Earth’s strong gravity well. As for why to do that, I like to think of Earth as a very cozy cave that humanity’s caveman would serve itself well to venture beyond, if only to increase the number of possibilities for the species. In a universe where there are large human civilizations not just throughout the solar system but also scattered amongst other star systems, there are numerous paths that each branch will take that Earth’s branch in its lonesome may never have trodden. It also just seems a bit cruel to be able to see the vastness of the universe and never be able to touch any of it in person. At the risk of being dramatic, only sending rovers and probes while we remain on earth feels a bit like being stuck in a gilded cage piloting around drones and RC cars to explore what lies beyond.
- z0r 2y ago
  Imagine being born in a habitat on another planet that is further away from Earth in travel time than one's lifespan, and being robbed of your birthright to experience the natural wonders and beauty of the cradle of humanity.
  - grecy 2y ago
    Imagine being born on an earth where millions of species have gone extinct, where there are hardly any old growth forests left, no bison roaming the central/western US plains and where thousands of water bodies around the world are so toxic they'll kill you if you fall in.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      I feel strongly that I was robbed of my birthright to be a mammoth hunter in a caveman tribe. Man didn't evolve for this industrial society we've created, our machinations have already denied to us our natural condition.
      - usrbinbash 2y ago
        If I could, I would go and be a watchmaker in the 18th century.
        jhbadger 2y ago
        There are times and places (including the 18th century) that seem like they could be interesting to live in, but then I consider the lack of indoor plumbing. It's not just the convenience -- the lack of hygienic facilities was a major reason why cholera and other water-transmitted diseases was such a problem even in the West until the late 19th century.
      - grecy 2y ago
        Move North. I spent years up there hunting bison & moose, catching salmon so big my arms hurt, cutting my own firewood to heat my home, helping friends build their log cabins with our bare hands (never got around to building my own...). You can live that life if you want, plenty of people up there live off grid and only come into town once a month or so. -48 is a hell of a thing. The most beautiful place I've ever been.
preisschild 2y ago
> There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar Roving vehicle. But a manned outpost beyond earth would make the logistics for large scale space exploration (even with robots) much more feasible, no?
- usrbinbash 2y ago
  > But a manned outpost beyond earth would make the logistics for large scale space exploration (even with robots) much more feasible, no? How would it do so exactly? Please give me a technical reason for this assumption. Because, I predict it would do the exact opposite: Keeping humans alive away from Earth eats up an enormeous amount of resources all on its own. Resources that could instead go into building better robots, building more robots, building more rockets.
elsonrodriguez 2y ago
We covered more ground in a lunar rover in a week than any of our mars rovers covered in a year.
- idlewords 2y ago
  But that week was fifty-two years ago.
  - elsonrodriguez 2y ago
    That is a further endorsement of human exploration.
- usrbinbash 2y ago
  > We covered more ground in a lunar rover in a week than any of our mars rovers covered in a year. And this counters my argument...how exactly? Even forgetting the fact that scientific progress isn't measured in "kilometers driven" (just count the number of experiments that Perseverance carries, and compare the amounts of data produced(, there is no technical reason a robot cannot drive as far as a vehicle carrying humans. In fact it's the opposite: One of the most important restrictions regarding the LRVs driving distance wasn't technological in nature, it was due to the the fact it had to carry humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle#Usage An operational constraint on the use of the LRV was that the astronauts must be able to walk back to the LM if the LRV were to fail at any time during the EVA (called the "Walkback Limit"). Thus, the traverses were limited in the distance they could go at the start and at any time later in the EVA. And even though they relaxed the constraints later on, the fact still remains: As soon as you have a human in the mix, things become more cumbersome, way more expensive, slower, less risks can be taken, and if things go wrong, the results can suddenly involve dead people instead of just trashed equipment.
  - elsonrodriguez 2y ago
    If our world-wide herculean efforts towards building a self driving robotic car have yielded mediocre results, I have low expectations for a robotic field geologist built on a NASA budget. Also note that even with the limitations, the humans surveyed more ground. Remove the limitation by making the rover a mobile habitat and now the humans can have an even more expansive and productive mission. Ultimately we're going to colonize space, why take 50x the time to gather the science needed for that goal, when worst-case we can spend 50x the budget and just put humans there to incidentally also gather knowledge on how to live in space.
billbrown 2y ago
This is why nearly all ocean exploration is done via remotely-piloted vehicles instead of the massive yet cramped submersibles they started with. The explorers still get to do the science they love but they do it from a comfortable surface ship in shifts.
botro 2y ago
I think if we follow your logic exactly, and make mathematically optimal decisions in every instance, leaving no space for the human spirit - we're robots anyway and may as well go to space!
- usrbinbash 2y ago
  This isn't about making optimal decisions, this is about not making obviously bad ones. Right now, with our current science and technology, sending humans on space-exploration missions, simply isn't worth it. It adds a huge pile of problems to an already difficult task, and technically speaking, we get almost nothing out of it; Robots are just better at examining rocks on other planets than we are, for the simple reason that the robot doesn't require a huge support infrastructure just to be kept alive. And the usual argument that developing such infrastructure would, in itself, confer some future advantage, has to be viewed with a lot of scepticism; fact of the matter is, the development of space-toilets does very little to improve the day-to-day tech we use here on Earth. Space Exploration is not comparable to any exploratory task in history, based on the sheer amount of resources and time required. These resources are finite. Allocating them correctly may not be super romantic, may not tickle the "human spirit", sure. But when things are this expensive and difficult, such considerations simply take a backseat. And if they don't, well, then there is the very real possibility of programs running into so many problems, delays and exploding costs, that at some point governments and companies can, or will, no longer support them, meaning decades before any significant development is even tried again. And as someone who wants space exploration to go forward as quickly and efficiently as possible, that simply doesn't seem like a very desirable outcome to me.
wtetzner 2y ago
> Figuring out ways to make human bodily functions not immediately fail in space. Next to none of these technologies benefit humanity at large in any way. What a weirdly confident statement. I could imagine all kinds of technology coming from that that would benefit life on Earth.
- usrbinbash 2y ago
  Really? Please, name some. Because we have had space toilets, space showers, etc. for quite some time now. What specific advancement to the tech that everyday people here on earth use in their daily lives have come from these developments?

lupusreal 2y ago

> There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar Roving vehicle. The Soviet Union did send a rover. Anyway, the science wasn't worth it and the project was driven by romantics who thought that it was the duty of mankind to explore. Putting men on the Moon was the real point of it.

jwells89 2y ago

Long-term habitation of surfaces of bodies other than that of Earth is a stepping stone to being able to live in space long term in very large, permanently spaceborne crafts. It’s easier to develop these things on the moon, mars, etc because of immediate access to materials that’d need to be launched into orbit otherwise. In the long term, it may make sense to build shipyards on the moon, on Mars, or somewhere in the asteroid belt where large ships can be built and launched without having to fight Earth’s strong gravity well. As for why to do that, I like to think of Earth as a very cozy cave that humanity’s caveman would serve itself well to venture beyond, if only to increase the number of possibilities for the species. In a universe where there are large human civilizations not just throughout the solar system but also scattered amongst other star systems, there are numerous paths that each branch will take that Earth’s branch in its lonesome may never have trodden. It also just seems a bit cruel to be able to see the vastness of the universe and never be able to touch any of it in person. At the risk of being dramatic, only sending rovers and probes while we remain on earth feels a bit like being stuck in a gilded cage piloting around drones and RC cars to explore what lies beyond.

z0r 2y ago
Imagine being born in a habitat on another planet that is further away from Earth in travel time than one's lifespan, and being robbed of your birthright to experience the natural wonders and beauty of the cradle of humanity.
- grecy 2y ago
  Imagine being born on an earth where millions of species have gone extinct, where there are hardly any old growth forests left, no bison roaming the central/western US plains and where thousands of water bodies around the world are so toxic they'll kill you if you fall in.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    I feel strongly that I was robbed of my birthright to be a mammoth hunter in a caveman tribe. Man didn't evolve for this industrial society we've created, our machinations have already denied to us our natural condition.
    - usrbinbash 2y ago
      If I could, I would go and be a watchmaker in the 18th century.
      - jhbadger 2y ago
        There are times and places (including the 18th century) that seem like they could be interesting to live in, but then I consider the lack of indoor plumbing. It's not just the convenience -- the lack of hygienic facilities was a major reason why cholera and other water-transmitted diseases was such a problem even in the West until the late 19th century.
    - grecy 2y ago
      Move North. I spent years up there hunting bison & moose, catching salmon so big my arms hurt, cutting my own firewood to heat my home, helping friends build their log cabins with our bare hands (never got around to building my own...). You can live that life if you want, plenty of people up there live off grid and only come into town once a month or so. -48 is a hell of a thing. The most beautiful place I've ever been.

preisschild 2y ago

> There is exactly ONE reason why Apollo was manned by people instead of robots: Because computers, electronics and robotics in the 60s were not up to the task. If todays tech existed back then, I would bet the Apollo rocket would have had exactly one passenger, and that would have been the Lunar Roving vehicle. But a manned outpost beyond earth would make the logistics for large scale space exploration (even with robots) much more feasible, no?

usrbinbash 2y ago
> But a manned outpost beyond earth would make the logistics for large scale space exploration (even with robots) much more feasible, no? How would it do so exactly? Please give me a technical reason for this assumption. Because, I predict it would do the exact opposite: Keeping humans alive away from Earth eats up an enormeous amount of resources all on its own. Resources that could instead go into building better robots, building more robots, building more rockets.

elsonrodriguez 2y ago

We covered more ground in a lunar rover in a week than any of our mars rovers covered in a year.

idlewords 2y ago
But that week was fifty-two years ago.
- elsonrodriguez 2y ago
  That is a further endorsement of human exploration.
usrbinbash 2y ago
> We covered more ground in a lunar rover in a week than any of our mars rovers covered in a year. And this counters my argument...how exactly? Even forgetting the fact that scientific progress isn't measured in "kilometers driven" (just count the number of experiments that Perseverance carries, and compare the amounts of data produced(, there is no technical reason a robot cannot drive as far as a vehicle carrying humans. In fact it's the opposite: One of the most important restrictions regarding the LRVs driving distance wasn't technological in nature, it was due to the the fact it had to carry humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Roving_Vehicle#Usage An operational constraint on the use of the LRV was that the astronauts must be able to walk back to the LM if the LRV were to fail at any time during the EVA (called the "Walkback Limit"). Thus, the traverses were limited in the distance they could go at the start and at any time later in the EVA. And even though they relaxed the constraints later on, the fact still remains: As soon as you have a human in the mix, things become more cumbersome, way more expensive, slower, less risks can be taken, and if things go wrong, the results can suddenly involve dead people instead of just trashed equipment.
- elsonrodriguez 2y ago
  If our world-wide herculean efforts towards building a self driving robotic car have yielded mediocre results, I have low expectations for a robotic field geologist built on a NASA budget. Also note that even with the limitations, the humans surveyed more ground. Remove the limitation by making the rover a mobile habitat and now the humans can have an even more expansive and productive mission. Ultimately we're going to colonize space, why take 50x the time to gather the science needed for that goal, when worst-case we can spend 50x the budget and just put humans there to incidentally also gather knowledge on how to live in space.

billbrown 2y ago

This is why nearly all ocean exploration is done via remotely-piloted vehicles instead of the massive yet cramped submersibles they started with. The explorers still get to do the science they love but they do it from a comfortable surface ship in shifts.

botro 2y ago

I think if we follow your logic exactly, and make mathematically optimal decisions in every instance, leaving no space for the human spirit - we're robots anyway and may as well go to space!

usrbinbash 2y ago
This isn't about making optimal decisions, this is about not making obviously bad ones. Right now, with our current science and technology, sending humans on space-exploration missions, simply isn't worth it. It adds a huge pile of problems to an already difficult task, and technically speaking, we get almost nothing out of it; Robots are just better at examining rocks on other planets than we are, for the simple reason that the robot doesn't require a huge support infrastructure just to be kept alive. And the usual argument that developing such infrastructure would, in itself, confer some future advantage, has to be viewed with a lot of scepticism; fact of the matter is, the development of space-toilets does very little to improve the day-to-day tech we use here on Earth. Space Exploration is not comparable to any exploratory task in history, based on the sheer amount of resources and time required. These resources are finite. Allocating them correctly may not be super romantic, may not tickle the "human spirit", sure. But when things are this expensive and difficult, such considerations simply take a backseat. And if they don't, well, then there is the very real possibility of programs running into so many problems, delays and exploding costs, that at some point governments and companies can, or will, no longer support them, meaning decades before any significant development is even tried again. And as someone who wants space exploration to go forward as quickly and efficiently as possible, that simply doesn't seem like a very desirable outcome to me.

wtetzner 2y ago

> Figuring out ways to make human bodily functions not immediately fail in space. Next to none of these technologies benefit humanity at large in any way. What a weirdly confident statement. I could imagine all kinds of technology coming from that that would benefit life on Earth.

usrbinbash 2y ago
Really? Please, name some. Because we have had space toilets, space showers, etc. for quite some time now. What specific advancement to the tech that everyday people here on earth use in their daily lives have come from these developments?