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> The only way to explore Mars in our lifetime is to ditch the requirement that people accompany the machinery.

It just doesn't make sense to me to send humans. Exhaust the science collection of robots first.

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I think people are more enthusiastic about robots than justifiable, because they see things like the Atlas robot and imagine that's the future. In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes, or in all probability would in 50 more.

The fundamental problem is that moving parts break. This results in things like rovers being exceptionally conservative in both their design and behavior, out of necessity. For instance Curiosity's drill can only drill to about 6cm, and even then it broke after 7 limited activations, which then took a team of scientists 2 years to come up with a partially effective workaround. A guy on the scene could have fixed it a few minutes, or done just as effective 'drilling' himself with a spoon. We're literally not even scratching the surface of what Mars has to offer.

Another issue is in mobility. That involves lots of moving parts. So Curiosity tends to move around at about 0.018 mph (0.03 km/h) meaning at its average speed it'd take about 2.5 days to travel a mile. But of course that's extremely risky since you really need to make sure you don't bump into a pebble or head into a low value area. So you want human feedback on a ~40 minute round trip total latency on a low bandwidth connection - while accounting for normal working hours on Earth. So in practice Curiosity has traveled a total of just a bit more than 1 mile per year. And as might be expected its tires have also, broken. So it's contemporary travel time would be even worse.

Imagine trying to dig into all the secrets of Earth by traveling around at 1 mile per year, and once every few years (on average) being able to drill hopefully up to 6cm. And all of these things btw are bleeding edge relative to the past. The issue of moving parts break is just an unsolvable issue for now and for anytime in the foreseeable future.

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Beyond all of this, manned spaceflight is inspiring, extremely inspiring. Putting a man on the Moon inspired an entire generation to science and achievement. The same will be true with the first man on Mars. NASA tried to tap into this with their helicopter drone on Mars but people just don't really care about rovers, drones, and probes. It'd be nice to live in a world where kids don't aspire to be friggin streamers when they grow up.

In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes

We can't be so sure. The probes have discovered that Mars has no channels and vegetation. That water is uncommon (then discovered that it is still there in some quantity). They found out precise atmospheric composition, mapped out all major surface features, observed the climate over decades. They discovered perchlorate toxicity of the soil for humans, something that would have been a nasty surprise to a manned crew.

Am not opposed to Mars expeditions in principle, it's an exciting thought. But I just can't see humans contributing all that much on the odd few landings, with a high chance of contaminating whatever traces of life there could be.

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>The fundamental problem is that moving parts break.

So do human bodies, and the extensive life support systems they would depend on in space, which I think was the theme, more than anything, of this particular article.

The only unique think I can personally add here that we're probably a lot more comfortable with high failure rates for machines than even low rates of failure for humans.

This seems to be a problem with rocket/lander technology resulting in a ~900kg weight limit on Curiosity.

According to Internet searches, Starship can bright 100 tons to Mars surface.

A common large Earth backhoe seem to weight 20 tons, so with Starship you can just ship one and it will be capable of driving at normal speeds (up to 100km/h), excavating for meters and not centimeters, etc.

(obviously it would need adaptations since diesel engines need air that isn't present on Mars and EV batteries might have problems with the cold, but it would be a similar weight magnitude)

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Big part of the problem is how big of a hurdle it is to actually send a robot to Mars. I imagine that once we have a cheap and reliable platform to reach the surface, we could iterate the robots much faster.

If you had a budget for one human mission, or a dozen new robots every two years, which one would you consider more beneficial?

> In reality the first man on Mars will likely discover far more in a week than we have in more than 50 years of probes

Robots will make a lot more progress in the next decades than humans will.

Also, it if takes us 50 years to send humans to Mars vs sending a constant stream of improving robots now, then robots win.

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I’m not an AGI believer, but I think the time horizon for AGI robots on Mars might actually be shorter than the one for humans on Mars.
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