Yeah, but then you are going to get a very little return from those 10 probes.

Sending a person there for a one way mission would probably give us more data than 100 probes. And I have a feeling that there are a lot of people willing to go on a such a mission.

I don't share your optimism.

Have a look at https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/20-breakthroughs-from-2... and keep in mind that those are those are already the highlights. The best they could come up with.

What sort of things would you expect on the list? A lot of those are critical prerequisites for humanity's advancement. They also left out some really important stuff like studies on sex in space, exercise in space, effects of radiation in space (as well as hardening electronics), and so on.

A space station on Mars would probably not provide much more than that so should be a low priority, but obviously the discoveries to be made on land trounce those to be made in space.

> A lot of those are critical prerequisites for humanity's advancement. They also left out some really important stuff like studies on sex in space, exercise in space, effects of radiation in space (as well as hardening electronics), and so on.

Hardening electronics research can be done without pesky humans getting in the way. No need for the ISS.

All the other examples you mentioned are quite circular: humans in space help us research problems we only have because we are putting humans in space.

You get extremely diminishing returns with probes. There's only so much you can do from orbit. Rovers are substantially more useful, but are extremely expensive. Curiosity and Perseverance each cost more than $3 billion. As the technology advances and we get the basic infrastructure setup, humans will rapidly become much cheaper than rovers.

A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development. The early human missions will obviously be extremely expensive as we pack in all the supplies to start basic industry (large scale Sabatier Reactions [1] will be crucial), energy, long-term habitation, and so on.

But eventually all you're going to need to be paying for is food/life support/medicine/entertainment/etc, which will be relatively negligible.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

> You get extremely diminishing returns with probes. There's only so much you can do from orbit. Rovers are substantially more useful, but are extremely expensive.

I was talking about anything you can do without humans. Not just probes that stay in space.

> A big cost with rovers is the R&D and one-off manufacturing of the rover itself. With humans you have the added cost of life support, but 0 cost in manufacturing and development.

You could mass produce rovers.

The human life support is gonna be extremely expensive. So it's a bit silly to say that other than that, humans have 0 cost.

Rovers have the same '0 cost' component, from the humans remotely given them commands and guidance from earth.