That depends on the complexity of the task. Complex tasks don't necessarily break down into simple parallel operations.russ_watters said:but it just isn't true that humans can be more productive overall than a similar commitment of robots.
That *might* be true and I did allow for a task too complicated/difficult for a robot to do, but it is pretty speculative whether or not that problem would apply/couldn't be overcome. The tasks would have to be designed first and judged in the context of existing (at the time) robots to know for sure. And either way, there is a lot of important "grunt" work that certainly can and should be done by robots before sending a human to make that big discovery only s/he can make.mheslep said:That depends on the complexity of the task. Complex tasks don't necessarily break down into simple parallel operations.
Or I just considered a different aspect than you? In particular, consider the claim by velocity_boy that humans wouldn't be significantly faster than robots.russ_watters said:You've badly missed the point of the productivity analysis.
I prefer the state "humans are not extinct" over the state "humans are extinct", thank you.jack action said:So the human race will be extincted some day. So what?
The rovers don't collect samples, they make measurements and then discard whatever they studied. In terms of samples that can be studied in more detail on Earth, a rover has 0 unless we make a sample return mission. The Apollo 17 crew covered 35 km (more than twice the total distance of Curiosity, although humans have to drive back again, so let's say they are about equal) and collected 741 samples in 3 days.russ_watters said:Regardless, @mfb didn't make that argument, he made a straight-up task completion count argument. And now that I actually look at his numbers, they don't seem to add up: 741 samples in 3 days with a crew of 2 is 123.5 samples per person per day. That's 20 times more than a dozen, not "even more than...30".* Perhaps he was referring just to the distance of travel, but that's an obvious nope; you can't be driving and taking samples at the same time. So the sample count and driving distance are mutually exclusive, not coincident tasks.
There is no such thing, a mission would have to be longer.russ_watters said:if you could have one 3-day trip to Mars
And it wouldn't have worked properly without human intervention. A few days of human intervention fixed something the telescope itself had no way to fix. They brought spare parts designed for the repair, sure, but developing a robot that could put these things in would have been extremely expensive (and still require a rocket to get there).sophiecentaur said:Humans spent just a few days on Hubble and that's been working for us for years and years.
Some of them are autonomous, but many of them require human intervention. Making all of them fully autonomous would be possible, but it would make them much more expensive.sophiecentaur said:How many of their experiments (apart from the Ines actually on humans) couldn't have been done by robots?
"More expensive". Does the word "more" include the negative cost of life support that wouldn't have been needed? When it comes to experimenting, you can't plug in just any astronaut and get optimal results for any random experiment. Humans are more flexible when it comes to re-jigging equipment where an experiment is going wrong. That's a fact. But sending up a replacement unmanned experiment (particularly LEO) would often be cheaper as a part payload with no spacemen involved.mfb said:Some of them are autonomous, but many of them require human intervention. Making all of them fully autonomous would be possible, but it would make them much more expensive.
russ_watters said:If the choice is to spend money on, say, lowering the poverty rate vs space exploration
sophiecentaur said:That's a nonsense reply. (Another straw man.)If you really believe that the human race is immortal
Hubble could not have operated properly without humans going there. It did not need humans around 24/7, but it would not have worked without human missions. Why are we talking about the past? It is still working - thanks to manned missions to it.sophiecentaur said:Hubble could not have been sustained with human operators. A couple of maintenance visits do not make it a manned experiment.
My comment was about the costs of individual experiments - you cannot get rid of the ISS without side-effects just because one experiment doesn't fly there. Assigning fractional ISS costs to individual experiments is at best questionable. How much do you assign to which experiment?sophiecentaur said:"More expensive". Does the word "more" include the negative cost of life support that wouldn't have been needed?
You are assuming that the majority of poor people in the world have the 'choice' of receiving welfare. Perhaps you should look a bit wider than just outside your door. In Victorian times there was an expression "the idle poor". That was when people were starving to death in the UK and we had The Workhouse. I do hope attitudes have progressed past that.nikkkom said:I'm not sure you can lower poverty rate by spending money on it. For example, giving $$$ to people who do not want to work and prefer to be poor by living entirely on welfare - this clearly does not work.
Are you suggesting that space missions don't have detailed power, energy and other resource budgets? You seem unable to say whether experiments were included for good reasons or just as makeweight activities. No conclusive argument either way, then. But we all know that human life support is not good value in many cases.mfb said:My comment was about the costs of individual experiments - you cannot get rid of the ISS without side-effects just because one experiment doesn't fly there. Assigning fractional ISS costs to individual experiments is at best questionable. How much do you assign to which experiment?
sophiecentaur said:You are assuming that the majority of poor people in the world have the 'choice' of receiving welfare.
sophiecentaur said:How many of these 'scroungers' do you actually know?
Do you think life on benefits is a bed of roses?
sophiecentaur said:Do you think those examples prove anything about people whose intelligence, education and self esteem is low to start with?
Homelessness is just two pay packets away for many people.
Single parenthood is not always due to a cynical attempt to milk the system
sophiecentaur said:You are very fortunate to be intelligent enough to hack life.
I am not saying that and I have no idea how you got that impression.sophiecentaur said:Are you suggesting that space missions don't have detailed power, energy and other resource budgets?
What?Can we get back to the topic of Mars, please?sophiecentaur said:You seem unable to say whether experiments were included for good reasons or just as makeweight activities.
Why do you think that is?nikkkom said:But some people choose it because they detest working more than being poor.
You don't have to agree with it. But you cannot stop every single budget item that you personally don't like. There are tons of things that get government funding that I don't want to support - but others do support it. We live in democracies (the majority of PF users does). If you don't like the political programs of a party, don't vote for the party. If you really dislike it, get active, convince others of your opinion, or even run for a political office.jack action said:To get back to the subject of this thread, some people want to use public funds to finance a manned mission to Mars. But what if I don't agree with it? Apparently, I have to. I have to work for it, whether I like it or not. If I don't, then I'm lazy.
Going to Mars is no guarantee that won't happen anyway. There's an argument that investing in Earth bound infrastructure is much better insurance against many type of calamities, e.g. subterranean shelter.nikkkom said:... and eventually dying out.
Why not? isn't Is standard business practice to do total costing where possible? How is even a simple thing like your stay in a hotel costed? (Staff costs, rent, breakfast ingredients etc.) / (guest times nights).mfb said:It is not very meaningful to say "out of the total ISS costs, we should assign X dollars to the total costs of this particular experiment".
That is not the point.mfb said:But you cannot stop every single budget item that you personally don't like.
Where possible.sophiecentaur said:Why not? isn't Is standard business practice to do total costing where possible?
Anarchy never worked well.jack action said:If everything was "voluntarily" funded, you could invest in manned Mars missions, @sophiecentaur could invest in cancer research and people who did not care for either could invest in nothing (i.e. less work for them) or in something else.
You made me think there but . . .They will know the mass, very accurately. That gives the cost of getting it up there. They will know its volume. They will know its electrical power consumption. Even the man-hours spent will be logged more accurately than most factory workers. A share of the cost of the total ISS project would not be hard but we already know that ISS is expensive to run compared with an autonomous vehicle. More prep effort on Earth for an autonomous experiment, of course, but a few hundred quid per man day for a lowly lab worker is almost down in the noise. Robotics and machine intelligence are making big strides. Every year, the capabilities are getting greater and costs come down - unlike the costs of having human operators. I think you would be hard pressed to justify ISS bound experiments that were not actually to do with 'humans in space'. The argument about using existing capacity on ISS is weaker in space than for situations on earth. Everything costs you up there. Nothing is free.mfb said:Please show that it is possible in a meaningful way.
True but one man's Anarchy is another man's Commercialism and isn't that what is being suggested as the way to Mars?mfb said:Anarchy never worked well.
jack action said:What is it to you that some people don't want to work? It is their choice and should be of no consequence to you.
mheslep said:> ... and eventually dying out.
Going to Mars is no guarantee that won't happen anyway. There's an argument that investing in Earth bound infrastructure is much better insurance against many type of calamities, e.g. subterranean shelter.
Same problem here. What is the cost to send a 100 gram experiment to space? If you have to launch a rocket for it, it costs millions, and tens of millions if you want to get it back in a controlled way. But that is not what you do. You take a rocket launch that happens anyway and put it there as tiny additional payload. Marginal cost: Nearly 0.sophiecentaur said:You made me think there but . . .They will know the mass, very accurately. That gives the cost of getting it up there. They will know its volume. They will know its electrical power consumption.
Marginal cost has nothing to do with it. When they sell penny washers, they don't use marginal costs to decide what to charge you for one.mfb said:Marginal cost: Nearly 0.
The way that Research is funded and costed can be very approximate and decisions about what to carry and what not to carry can be arbitrary. The choices associated with ISS were clearly not based on a good rationale. You are implying from that, that there is no objective way to decide between manned and unmanned experiments so we should just go for human experimenters because you like the idea?mfb said:If the ISS would be operated by a company, that company would invent some formula to assign costs to every experiment, but that formula would have a lot of arbitrary decisions built in. We don't have to do that for a research station.
But marginal cost and total cost are everything you can reliably determine.sophiecentaur said:Marginal cost has nothing to do with it.
I don't see what would be clear about that, and I think it is just your personal opinion.sophiecentaur said:The choices associated with ISS were clearly not based on a good rationale.
No I am not implying that. Where do you get that idea from?sophiecentaur said:You are implying from that, that there is no objective way to decide between manned and unmanned experiments so we should just go for human experimenters because you like the idea?
I don't understand what you are saying or asking here.sophiecentaur said:I guess the main argument against using manned space experiments is that it has not been the choice of many experimenters; there are very few humans in orbit, doing experiments and thousands of remote experiments riding on satellites over the years. What would be so different about Mars that you are not even questioning the wisdom of using humans?
Are you suggesting that there are enough properly paid jobs to go round? People in the 'rust belt' of the US would tell you different. Trump's (quoted) plans for a home industry providing employment for all are based on early 20th century manufacturing and his personal practice has been to go for automation where it made sense.nikkkom said:It is of a consequence for everybody who works, when there are many millions of them,
How long is the "forever" in that post? Are you intending that humans will last beyond the lifetime of our Sun? What is your basis for that? And I have to ask why??nikkkom said:staying on Earth, forever,
My opinion is based on sources like this, which lists some of the expenses involved in the ISS. The 'fun' cargo that was taken by staff would not have been needed by robot experiments. This link also has evidence that the 'value' of ISS is questionable. Otoh, there is a vast amount published by NASA etc, which opines that ISS has been much more worth while. But "they would, wouldn't they"?mfb said:I don't see what would be clear about that, and I think it is just your personal opinion.
My point, badly put perhaps, is that the history of space experimentation has much fewer manned experiments than autonomous experiments. The purpose of ISS was clearly (yes - clearly) more than just to do experiments and the value that was obtained from the International aspect is impossible to assess. It was as much a vanity project for the politicians as it was a platform for experiments that were tailored to human operatives. The arguments for and against a manned lab on Mars are much the same in principle as arguments for and against ISS. In hindsight, the success or value of the ISS is not an open and shut case. Any decision for a significant and long term human presence should involve even more scrutiny of what we have actually got from ISS and how much it has actually cost. The parallels are pretty obvious.mfb said:I don't understand what you are saying or asking here.
Pretty close to a guarantee that people will die in the attempt. Likely many people in an attempt to colonize.nikkkom said:The thing is, while going to Mars does not guarantee anything,
Then let's get back to this in a few billion years....staying on Earth, forever, guarantees dying out.
There is really only one choice - "we should expand in space", unless you consider "yes, let's die out" to be a rational choice.
Neither would unmanned experiments need oxygen or food. Where is the point?sophiecentaur said:The 'fun' cargo that was taken by staff would not have been needed by robot experiments.
It is 7 years old. At that time we had all the construction costs, but only a small fraction of science done.sophiecentaur said:This link also has evidence that the 'value' of ISS is questionable.
Autonomous experiments are spread out over more satellites, but if you just count the number of scientific experiments done, manned space stations dominate, doing hundreds to thousands of experiments in one place.sophiecentaur said:My point, badly put perhaps, is that the history of space experimentation has much fewer manned experiments than autonomous experiments.
I looked t through the list. It's hard to be sure which of the ISS-board experiments could only have been done with live operators. I realize the list of biological measurements needed humans up there but there are many others mentioned. How many of those really needed human intervention and how many have been run just to fill up spare time and to justify the presence of a human crew? We're talking $100Bn or thereabouts. Maybe not the most expensive 'thing' in history but it's up there with the front runners.mfb said:This outdated list (hardly any updates since 2011) has about 500 entries,
The point is that the overheads for humans are more than what's needed just to support life. Yet another needless expense in many cases.mfb said:Neither would unmanned experiments need oxygen or food. Where is the point?
mheslep said:Pretty close to a guarantee that people will die in the attempt. Likely many people in an attempt to colonize.
Then let's get back to this in a few billion years.
Non sequitor. I'm not arguing to ban anything, nor that people should hide in their basements for safety. I do argue that going to Mars offers little to extend the long term survival of humans (as you say, no 'guarantee') relative to measures available on earth, and going there in the next decades will likely kill some people; those lethal risks might be worth the exploration but won't save humanity.nikkkom said:Otherwise, these people would live forever?
Every single day, in US about 100 people die in car crashes. We should ban cars?
The only fact +1by is the increased solar output. In a discussion where environmental conditions that don't support life are a given, and advanced tech is assumed, many sci fi like measures are possible, e.g. space based sun shield, subterranean habitation. Surface temp on the day side of the moon, where colonies have long been proposed, can hit 123C.The Earth will be uninhabitable (surface temps in excess of 100 C) in "only" one billion year, due to rising luminosity of the Sun.
Fair enough. I see the same facts and assess no urgent need to go, especially with existing propulsion tech.In any case, regardless of how many millions of years "we can afford to wait", I don't see the point in waiting.
There are possible scenarios where humans, or even most of life on Earth, can be wiped out without much warning.
It's strange how people apply different criteria in different circumstances. There are many possible scenarios that you will be wiped out on your way to work tomorrow. Have you made any special plan to eliminate that possibility? Will you drive extra slowly or choose a travel time that's not so busy. It's one thing to talk about vast schemes to preserve homo sapiens but another thing to preserve ones own life a bit longer. Eat properly, exercise , avoid smoking and alcohol.. None of us takes that amount of care. "Well, you've got to die sometime". Likewise for the human race. Why not accept it?nikkkom said:There are possible scenarios where humans, or even most of life on Earth, can be wiped out without much warning.
sophiecentaur said:It's strange how people apply different criteria in different circumstances. There are many possible scenarios that you will be wiped out on your way to work tomorrow.
Or ... maybe we just survive as a life form and other "civilizations" are on other planets, so it's OK for our "civilization" to die sooner or later?nikkkom said:Irrelevant. I will be dead anyway, sooner or later. We don't survive individually, we survive as a civilization.
That would be a first, then. Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Third Reich . . . It also works that way with bacteria.nikkkom said:we survive as a civilization.
jack action said:Or ... maybe we just survive as a life form and other "civilizations" are on other planets, so it's OK for our "civilization" to die sooner or later?
Likewise, there is no Law of Physics that says we should expect to be able to survive for an unlimited time. Experience tells us that there are variations in circumstances and if one doesn't get you, the next one may. Frankly, I don't have any problem with facing personal mortality nor the mortality of the human race. That doesn't mean I have no will to survive or that I would just lay back and let it happen (just to forestall any Straw Man response). I think it is amazingly over optimistic to assume that humans will not do themselves harm that will put an end to them. We won't have to wait millions of years for a Bay of Pigs or a North Korea situation that will actually not be recovered from. That's just being realistic.nikkkom said:There is no known laws of physics which stops us from surviving for practically unlimited stretch of time
