Hacker News

points by teachrdan 19 hours ago | 0 comments

> Robots are an interesting topic because people don't seem to understand how limited they are

You've hit the nail on the head here. Investing in robots is an infinitely smarter -- and more cost-effective -- play than just sending humans to Mars and hoping for the best, centuries worth of radiation be damned.

If robots really are too fragile to do so much as dig holes in the Martian surface, then lets improve the robots. This has the added benefit of having actual, immediate utility here on Earth!

You're saying that robots are too fragile to rely on for Mars exploration. You know what else is fragile? A human being. And it's far easier to make a robot more durable.

This conversation has helped me understand what I personally believe to be a fallacy behind almost all arguments for the human exploration (much less settlement) of Mars: the fallacy of urgency. There is absolutely no reason why we must drastically increase our exploration of the surface of Mars right now. (or in 10+ years or whenever we would hypothetically land humans there)

If it takes longer than those "10 years" to design more competent and durable robots, who cares? There's exactly zero rush to send humans to Mars -- except that, you know, it would be kinda cool if we did. The money spent on robot research would more than pay for itself in utility on Earth in a way that money spent on shielding humans and sending the cargo necessary to keep them alive in a distant, hostile environment never will.

[–] somenameforme 16 hours ago

I think you are rather dramatically underestimating what goes into the current systems of robotics. Curiosity and Perseverance are the result of decades of research by teams of hundreds of scientists with decades of work and research and budgets in the billions of dollars. 'We just need to make them orders of magnitude better' is nonsensical. You're looking at the best that we can do, and it's nowhere even remotely near to what's needed for robotics to be effective. And fragility is just one aspect - mobility, power, and many others also lag far behind what they'd need for robotics to be viably competitive with humans.

So now you're left with some argument that ends up like 'Okay - so we can't do it with robotics right now, but I want to do it with robotics, so we shouldn't do it until we can do it with robotics.' I mean the answer is quite obvious. Humans can do it, humans want to do it, and thus humans will do it. I don't entirely understand why you're so averse to this. To not be coy, one obvious explanation is a political thing about Musk. Outside of that being petty, it's also largely irrelevant - China's a major player in this game as well, and it's conceivable that they get there before we do. And I don't think this is just going to be a two pony race this time either, especially when the goal isn't just footprints and flags.