Why would you want to send humans to get it? Space is really inhospitable for humans, but machines seem to like it just fine.

Offshore oil and gas mining is rapidly being automated, and if they could, they would eliminate humans from the process altogether. Nobody wants to go out and live on a frozen windblown metal can full of industrial machinery, in the middle of an ocean, that could sink at any time. That's why you have to pay people a lot of money to do it.

After you get over the romantic narrative of space, it really doesn't sound any more appealing than the oil platform. I mean, sure, I'm curious. But I wouldn't want to live there.

The estimates I've seen for a human mission to Mars are about 100-500 times the budget for Curiosity. So even if astronauts could accomplish things 52X faster (and I'm skeptical they would), it still wouldn't be as cost efficient. And that's even before you factor in the fact that the Mars Rover is going to be doing work on Mars much, much longer than a human mission would (Curiosity is going on 8 years).

Human space exploration is a solution in search of a problem. People don't seem to be rationally looking for the best way to get certain information from Mars or for the best sources of materials that could be obtained with future technology (there are many overlooked terrestrial ones) and soberly deciding that astronauts are the best answer. They seem to start out with the goal of defending human space exploration, and then searching for problems to try to justify it.

(Yes, there is a lot of controversy over colonialism that I won't get into here.)

I think the Polynesians would like a word. And the "vast economic benefits" are dubious given the total human cost of introducing new diseases into unprepared ecosystems and populations - plus the import of abundant New World silver provided coin for the financing of the long, devastating mercenary wars of the early modern period in Europe and disrupted and destabilized the economy of China.

But in any case, humans had pretty much covered the globe outside Antarctica by the time Columbus set sail, in environments that, harsh as they may be, still provided breathable air, drinkable water and food if you knew how to hunt/scavenge/grow it.

Jokes aside, you are right, of course. We don't have to worry about environmental effects or native populations in the same way when dealing with off-World colonies on sterile worlds. That alone should provide some incentive for commercial exploitation of things like asteroids; at some point Earth will either run out of certain elements, or other factors will result in certain elements being more easily obtainable off-world.

We can see into the space through telescopes, while the seafaring explorers needed to literally go to some place to see what it was like.

Robotics still ain't good enough to make it work alone, we'll need manned missions to establish a manufacturing-based economy in cislunar space, if we want to get anything done this century. Risky, manned missions, that in time will yield good profits.

NASA has a whole page about it now. And here's a rather large paper (I remember reading a shorter version, but with the same pictures inside): https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11871.

See [32]-[35]

Of course, an industry established at a moon settlement could do it for even less. :-P (1/4)

Isn’t there something about “exploration” that seems important to a non-neglible amount of humans? I don’t want everything we do to serve the rat race we’re in. Let’s loose our money on something amazing.

There's a lot more to exploration than space exploration (I think exploring something like the human brain will end up having a greater emotional and practical impact myself). But even if we just look at space exploration, we don't really get a lot from human space flight. As I said, in situations where it's possible to use human astronauts, robots seem like they would be more effective. And for most of the places in our solar system, we simply won't be able to use humans at all anytime soon. The missions to, say, Europa are going to be done by robots.

Still, many people, including myself, enjoyed watching the launch. Maybe something like this is more analagous to a cathedral or memorial.

Not to mention, a probe or rover sent far away all have to go through one of the few DSNs, that can only do so much and so fast[0], and are generally scarce services. Forget about e.g. running 20 simultaneous robotic missions in different areas of Mars.

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network#Curren...

I have to ask, why the rush? Why not wait 30-50 years until the robots are smart enough? Or we can bioengineer humans that are better adapted to that harsh environment?

This feels a bit like a real time strategy game, where someone at the start of the game wants to spend all their resources on big expensive research projects near the end of the tech tree. You're always better off building up the economy so you have enough surplus to tackle those expensive items later.

(Note that RTS economy is based around acquiring new resources. You can't make minerals by advertising, speculating, or even having your soldiers trade with each other. There are games that try to simulate trade, e.g. Stellaris, but even there it behaves more like a mine than like an economy.)

(Also: the rush is because our lifespans are finite, and I'd like to at least see some of that before I die.)

Also, in terms of bettering our lives... I'd bet advertising beats the ISS. What has the ISS given us? I know hundreds of small businesspeople that would never have gotten off the ground without modern advertising. There are people out there that click on ads and buy things, and that makes them happy.

It certainly is way overpriced in my opinion, but for me, it has served as a reason to wake up excited on many of my days off.

That being said, ads are a great way to bootstrap so many awesome things. I think the cynicism comes from the feeling of privacy invasion.

This is exactly what SpaceX is doing with the eventual goal of putting people on Mars. They've been finding and solving problems the whole time but the ultimate problem is that we still have all of our eggs in one basket and we're one asteroid, volcano, war, or pandemic away from civilizational collapse. Creating a self-sustaining population off planet is the only way to solve that problem.

I suspect the majority of future exploration will stay robotic though. There are going to be some high-profile missions, but once we start looking more at asteroids and other targets far out in the solar system, then robots will continue to do the bulk of the work.

As far as I am concerned, the major breakthrough here is the reusability that SpaceX is bringing into the table. If we can lower prices of sending stuff to outer space, then we'll be able to do so much more with current space exploration budgets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt...

I could imagine a lot of volunteers if you promised 5 years worth of dried food, comms back to earth and lots of fame.

But this is something that's not going to be allowed.

Look at all the safety measures they're putting in spacecraft to ensure people live. No way is anyone going to approve a one way trip to Mars.

I sometimes wish people were more comfortable with their own mortality and death in general, but that's how all the humans with "warrior genes" died off.

If you would have the rockets and equipment and a place in a small state to launch the rockets: who do you need to approve it?

I think you are underestimating the challenges they have to overcome to get machines to work in space.

Even if it’s hard, it’s still a lot easier than getting humans to work in space.

The critical point you're missing is that any mining and processing equipment will require their own life support that will already be able to support humans. Machines are significantly more complicated without a gas to convect heat away from all surfaces, they'll need massive fluid handling and filtering systems for lubricants and cooling fluid, the mining operations will need tons of oxygen and scrubbing for their chemistry, and clean water will be required by pretty much every process. The only way we'll pull this off is by using our existing experience on this planet and that requires the same conditions that support life.

That sounds like I'm exaggerating but we've already spent more than a generation in space studying the effects of zero-g and we just barely got a working 3D printer on the ISS a few years ago. No advanced mining, processing, or other manufacturing equipment to speak of beyond lab scale R&D devices. We have one lab capable of continuous zero g research and a few 747s capable of achieving it a a few minutes at a time.

We never explored the surface of Mars, or landed on an asteroid before we had our machines do it, but we managed it anyway with the human operators still on Earth.

Definitely not "back on earth". Lag is an issue with VR as-is with mere milliseconds of it, and you'd be calling for minutes of latency there.

And "in a nearby spaceship" would, definitionally, involve getting humans most of the way there; might as well get them all the way there at that point.

Obviously doing this for robots on Earth is tricky and largely pointless, given it's probably easier to just reduce the latency directly. For remote mining on asteroids or something there's not a whole lot going on in space. You're not going to get a random pedestrian or cyclist suddenly popping out in front of your robot. It's far more practical to model and simulate it entirely in e.g. a game engine, and then record it.

At least, that's my guess where things will go.

The point about the spaceship is not distance related but that building life support structures into everything is quite expensive, whereas building them once in a spaceship and then extending the human presence to all surrounding structures would be a lot cheaper.

True, but that has limitations, right? Meteorite impacts, electromechanical failures, and such still do happen. Plus on Mars there's still dust flurries and such, and then you've got Titan with its "dummy thicc" atmosphere blowing stuff around even harder, though obviously asteroids wouldn't have those issues.

With the Mars rovers we're basically in a position of "well we'll run them as long as we can, but if they get stuck in a rut they're hosed". Spirit and Opportunity would probably still be running and collecting science if we had human crews nearby able to hop over and fix them up.

> The point about the spaceship is not distance related but that building life support structures into everything is quite expensive, whereas building them once in a spaceship and then extending the human presence to all surrounding structures would be a lot cheaper.

Right, but my point there is that "surrounding structures" implies you're basically pretty much there anyway. You don't necessarily need life support structures in the mining equipment itself; you just need some spot for the ship to dock for a sec while the maintenance crews don their spacesuits and do their repairs.

Even if we did build human-habitable areas in those "surrounding structures" (e.g. break rooms, workshops, bunks), as long as there's a supply chain to provide air/water/food (and the first two could likely be extracted from the asteroid itself) I suspect it wouldn't be that much of an additional cost in the grand scheme of things, especially when weighed against the increase in productivity.

Plus, you gotta think on the flip-side, too: would it make sense to haul all those life support structures around on a moving ship? If you're sending crews someplace often enough it seems reasonable to have those on-site and thus not have to haul all that mass with you (then again, depending on the length of the trip such facilities might be necessary anyway).

No, but it’s tremendously easier to fly these robots there than doing the same with humans. We can afford to let robots “die” on Mars; humans not really.

The fact we've yet to automate so much here with such large incentive to do so is evidence we're not there yet.

Really we're pretty far from semi-autonomous systems for stuff like mining, we're just starting to get problem solving working in AI just look at the DARPA challenge for how far we are from being able to assign relatively small tasks to resolve problems.

You are already living in space. :)

(Though in all honesty, I want to see both happen because I loved both Star Trek and SeaQuest DSV as a kid.)

But yeah, it's not for everyone. Imo, it would be pretty exciting to continuously enlarge some sort of habitat somewhere.

In case there's no way to return to Earth, would definitely need a steady supply of drugs of all kinds and good doctors, otherwise suicides would become the number one cause of death soon enough.

And the concept of space-mining likely will not involve people. We are already replacing men with machines in mines on earth because of associated costs. I imagine the first space miners won't be guys in spacesuits carrying shovels. They will be machines.

Imo what ever comes after homo sapiens inherits the solar system, not homo sapiens ourselves

Even for regular human asteroid mining it looks like an artificial magnetosphere would be possible: https://physicsworld.com/a/magnetic-shield-could-protect-spa...

It's still surprising to me that the notion isn't prevalent in sci-fi or even hard sci-fi. Though as you mention even a modified MRI could do the job.

Are you invested in spaceflight then? I don't see it being very obvious at all. Yes, some precious metals can be recovered in large quantities but they aren't intrinsically valuable. These materials are used in things like catalysts, batteries and chemical processes where we could also invest to remove the dependence on them.

One material Robert Zubrin is interested in is a rare form of hydrogen. He thinks that it would be a good candidate for fusion if we ever figure it out.

perhaps not, but materials in space can be assembled to functional components in space. functional components beget more things happening in space.

> remove the dependence on them

cool. you can beam electricity from space, too...