Robots Will Pave the Way To Mars 95
szotz (2505808) writes "There's a lot of skepticism swirling around NASA's plan to send humans to Mars in the 2030's, not to mention all those private missions. If we want to have sustainable (read: not bank-breaking) space exploration, the argument goes, there's no way we can do it the way we've been going to the moon and low-Earth orbit. We have to find a way to exploit space resources and cut down on the amount of stuff we need to launch from Earth. That's not a new idea. But this article in IEEE Spectrum suggests research on resource extraction and fabrication in low and zero gravity might actually be making progress...and that we could take these technologies quite far if we get our act together."
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Actually - religion seems to me to be more of an anchor to earth, than a reason to go off planet. Your religious nuts are more likely to argue, "If God wanted us in space, he would have PUT US IN SPACE!"
As for getting out act together - I'm sure that will impress the next big rock scheduled to strike the earth. "Hey, those humans have gotten their act together! Maybe I'll just nudge myself into a near miss orbit, instead of obliterating life on earth!"
So, tell us, which religion do you subscribe to? Sou
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Very few of us can truly laugh at ourselves, even though the one's who can seem to have the very best sense of humor.
And your nigger jokes aren't funny.
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I like how you're thinking. I'm trying to remember a story - I've read so damned many - there was a planet, could have even been Mars, where they kept the public away because they found God's thumbprint on it. Kinda crazy that I can't even remember the title or author, but the idea has come back to me from time to time. Anyway, yeah, in theory God is experimenting with a zillion other life forms on a whole bunch of other planets, and it would be presumptuous of us to go out and meddle with his other stuf
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If, however, you are betting the light bill money on the outcome, consider that it is takeout orders of magnitude more plausible the moderator posted later in this thread.
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Weird, 30 minutes ago that comment had a moderation, now it has none. Does that happen often or only to posts that go against the Holy Orthodoxy Of The Species' True Destiny In Space, Amen?
Or it could be that the Slashdot servers are out of sync.
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Mod points can't be changed, only deleted. Could be somebody accidentally down-modded somewhere else in this discussion, and posted with their real uid to undo the mistake. If they had previously up-modded the parent, that mod point would be gone now too.
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Isnt it pretty obvious to send an automated system to prepare a safe habitat anyway?
Oh, come now, surely the fact that ordering replacement laborers would take (given historical mission data, as a rough guide) at least 100 days, quite possibly two or three times that, and cost tens of millions of dollars a head (very optimistic figure) doesn't change the viability of using humans to do dangerous construction and heavy industrial jobs, does it?
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Take the British Empire. Please. They basically colonized America and Australia with folks they didn't want who didn't want to be there.
Human life is not so different from all other earthly life, in that it usually seeks to expand its environment during times of strife, resource shortage, and unpleasantness.
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The truth is, we have given very little thought to what traits would be selected for in a hostile, alien environment. There would likely be catastrophic loss of life while we were navigating the learning curve to a life on Mars, let alone a venture outside our solar system.
Maybe our best and brightest will be interpreting data and making corrections while the adventurers sort things out.
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The truth is, we have given very little thought to what traits would be selected for in a hostile, alien environment.
We haven't put a lot of thought into it because it doesn't require much. Any corporation's HR department is already well-equipped to draft requirements for that kind of position: 15-20 years of experience building and maintaining extraterrestrial habitats, and able to make solid decisions and perform under intense pressure (or an increasing lack thereof).
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It's hotter on Mars.
If by "hot" you mean "freezing fucking cold" then yeah it is.
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that's quite an absurd concept you have, that climate change would cause the loss of Earth's human population. not even remotely possible. did Al Gore put that idea in your head? here's a hint, he's a liar, sensationalist and a whackjob. Also a rich hypocrite with twenty times your family's carbon footprint.
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If you're not familiar with potholer54 [youtube.com] you should check out his videos on climate change. He cuts through the BS/hype on both sides of the issue, and is reasonably amusing too. Very worth the time.
Wally? (Score:2)
Why do we need pavement to Mars? (Score:4, Funny)
I don't think I would enjoy the drive.
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You drive on the pavement?!
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You drive on the pavement?!
He must be American. Americans have no word for footpath because they drive everywhere.
Robot's reply (Score:2)
No problem. We'll do the hard work and 'pave the way'. But if you meatbags expect us to hold the camera when you arrive like MacArthur at Leyte, you're out of your fscking minds.
Ad astra per aspera (Score:3)
To the stars through asteroids... we need to bring them close enough from here to move manufacturing to the space. It will take quite a bit of investment, but once we get there we can go to mars and the rest of the solar system way far cheaper, and probably will bring more than enough benefits down here, both for the developed technologies to make it viable, and the things and materials that could be manufactured/acquired that way. It is just an investment, just the kind of things that make the banks live.
Of course, bringing asteroids large enough (i.e. of the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs) to be profitable close enough to earth could trouble a lot of people.
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what would we get from an asteroid that would make space travel possible? anything found in them is common on earth too. earth is a bunch of asteroids and comets that coelesced together.
Re: Ad astra per aspera (Score:2, Informative)
Materials that are already in space.
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It would take roughly five hundred years of the world's entire GDP to launch a mass equivalent to one small kilometer-diameter asteroid into low orbit.
Now can you see the blinding lightning-arc connecting points A and B?
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that blinding arc is between your ears. we don't need to launch a one-kilometer diameter asteroid to explore space. at least make a straw man, and not a shit mound.
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Water.
Quoted for emphasis. Even if the only thing we could extract was water, we could potentially use it for potable water, breathable air, rocket fuel, radiation shielding, hydroponics, cleaning... Basically, it would be difficult to have too much water on any extraterrestrial habitat.
Second to water would be just oxygen itself, which supposedly we can bake out of various oxides if we get it hot enough.
After those two items, it's a toss up, at least until we can do much fancier things. The article suggests e
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no, water is burned rocket fuel. unburning it requires almost twice the energy you get from burning hydrogen, and even more energy is required to put it in compact state (liquifiying)
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asteroids are mostly made of much, much more boring things than that
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but there is HUGE difference in processes in tectonically active rocky planet like earth compared to garden variety sized asteroids, we have processes that make concentrated ore bodies (magmatic, hydrothermal, metamorphic shearing, and exogenous)
that's why "mining asteroids" might not even be possible or economical without first entirely melting one down! not to say that in the FAR future that might be possible, but hardly a gateway to the planets or stars in the next century.
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We're not looking for crystals, we're looking for metals, IMO. Not a single process you mentioned makes metals; need stars for that. If an asteroid simply had concentrations of the most base metals it would be worth mining for nothing more than processed metals being already in space vice conventional rocket fuel lifting them up from Earth. Either way, mining asteroids is an easy way to get materials processed in space without a single environmental concern for our planet.
As to your last comment, how wou
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I think moving asteroids into earth orbit will be the next big space race. It will ostensibly be for scientific research and mining, but in reality will be a race to make sure that both China and the US can annihilate each other with kinetic bombardment.
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Science is a risky undertaking in its advancement of military technology, but it has led to some decent advancements.
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Tautology. If you arrive at the point where you can't muddle through, it'll turn hot very quickly.
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It'll be a while before we start towing asteroids into Earth orbit. Earth-Moon Lagrange points will be the first destinations, then after we get good at that we'll gradually allow more and bigger rocks closer to Earth.
As for kinetic bombardment from orbit, the energy budget is not promising for this scenario. The amount of reaction mass needed to de-orbit a large boulder is "non trivial" to say the least. I suppose you could build a rail-gun and shoot a small mass at high velocity in order nudge a bigger ro
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Personally.. (Score:3)
Personally I welcome all our robot overlords who buggered off to mars. Oh wait.
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Personally I welcome all our robot overlords who buggered off to mars. Oh wait.
They'll be back as Cylons soon enough, you'll get your chance before they blast you to bits.
Robots are useful on Earth, too (Score:2)
Research in robotics is especially useful because it has direct applications here on Earth, which makes it more likely to attract private investment and increases the likelihood of being able to spin off space tech for consumer purposes.
Maybe in the future we'll be able to build robots using off-the-shelf parts to do boring, dangerous tasks here on Earth, and use slightly more robust versions (still made of mostly off-the-shelf parts) on Mars without spending billions on R&D.
The easiest way to build bil
Get our act together (Score:1)
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Proof: even though we can add numbers far faster and cheaper today, space is still as dead as ever. And so it shall be.
Wrong. There's far, far more life in space now than there was when we went to the moon. The ISS has been continuously occupied for almost 14 years. Mir was inhabited for 12, and Salyut and Apollo/Soyuz before that. In fact, since the Apollo program ended, there has not been a year gone by that hasn't had someone in space.
And that's only people. Heaven knows how many plants and animals and microorganisms have been in, or are even now, in orbit. Space has been brimming with life ever since Neil's boot
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With that said, feasibility of the mission and the sense in spending large amounts of money on it are valid questions, and
Mars is not far... (Score:2)
Re: Mars is not far... (Score:1)
Water: doesn't produce hull-penetrating deadly radiation.
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We're not ready for Mars yet (Score:2)
Heard this before (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
Thatâ(TM)s the scenario laid out some 35 years ago by a team of academics and NASA engineers meeting at the University of Santa Clara, in California.
There were still AI people talking this up when I was at Stanford CS in the 1980s. They wanted to have self-replicating robots on the Moon or Mars by 2000. I asked "how soon could you have it working in Arizona?" Some people didn't like that.
It's embarrassing how bad robot manipulation is in unstructured situations. DARPA is trying to fix that by throwing money at the DARPA Humanoid Challenge. But so far, the machines in that are mostly teleoperated. (Ignore the edited videos for popular consumption; look at the split-screen videos that show three views of the machine and one of the operators, who often are using game controllers.)
I'd like to see a robotic system able to do simple parts changes on a car - air filter, fuel filter, spark plugs, etc., removing and replacing any covers and cables needed to do the job.
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Basic Accounting (Score:3)
Research on those things never has been the problem. The problem is that it's going to be extraordinarily expensive to get and maintain all that resource extraction and exploitation infrastructure on stream. The only way to "save" money is to a) treat the costs as sunk costs and thus not apply them to missions flown, or b)... there really isn't a "b". (Unless you fly a sufficiently large number of missions frequently enough that said costs become a minor component of the overhead - which really isn't "sustainable" because it doesn't create any savings because of the high total costs of all those missions.)
We can't even do this on earth yet... (Score:3)
one of the more depressing things is that no one is building a von neumann machine.
We have at least one of these already... the total human industrial complex on earth is of course capable of replicating itself.
The problem is that its dispersed, poorly organized, designed more for production efficiency and capacity then for space/mass efficiency... etc.
If you started out with one large warehouse and started putting at least one of every factory machine in existence... and then started combining them where they do similar things that can be tweaked so one machine does two roles... and then started miniaturizing them so you could squeeze the whole thing down. The point is that you should be able to fit a machine that can replicate itself and all human industry into a launchable package.
Consider that everything we have was made with these soft clumsy hands. Everything we have comes from those hands making tools, which made tools, which made tools, which make everything.
So we need to make something that can do that on mars or the moon or anywhere. Ideally not soft organic hands... those work on earth where our biosphere supports our life... but on other worlds you're going to need robots. And if you're building robots you might as well make the robots more specialized so you can skip a few steps.
We should have already done this... launch a package at the moon and mars... and then just have the robots dig in and start building an industrial infrastructure.
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What could go wrong?
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You're of course referring to some sort of run away AI that becomes a threat to humanity or something.
Easily avoided through compartmentalized specialized AIs that deal with specific tasks.
For example... lets say you have a mining AI... this AI is in command of mining robots. Those robots under a worst case could be used to mine "people" or destroy things we care about or need to live. That's bad... but what if we only give that AI control over mining robots and do not give it command over the machines that
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Sure, anything breaks if you subvert it... a boat holds water out unless you put lots of holes in the bottom too...
doesn't mean the boat design was flawed prior to poking the holes.
As to management doing stupid things, I don't really see it as terribly likely since such a system wouldn't need to be heavily micromanaged. The AIs would take care of all the fiddly bits and the gross details would probably be something humans would if anything enjoy doing.
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In other words, avoid the problems of a von Neumann machine by making something other than a von Neumann machine.
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No... the von neumann machine isn't dangerous or problematic... the problem was with some sort of badly programmed AI that governs the machine.
I showed how the system could be programmed such that the risks were manageable even under a worst case scenario.
I therefore solved the cited problem.
Give me a cookie right fucking now or I'll cut you.
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You need to be able to to do it on earth first... we can't do it on earth yet... or at least haven't put any effort into it.
We obviously could do it if we tried. But we haven't.
I suspect some of the reason might be political... fully automated factories scare people... especially people that work in factories and their political allies.
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one of the more depressing things is that no one is building a von neumann machine.
Sure we are. They're called genetic engineers.
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Only really useful in our biosphere... not really useful on the moon or mars.
A practical machine should act as a seed we can fling into space, landing on a given world, building the industry we require for comfortable life possibly over decades, and then falling under our direct control when colonists/administrators take up residence.
The genetics point is valid within our biosphere... though was we can make with such technology is still pretty limited when compared to what we can make with more traditional
Better than robots (Score:1)
Yo... 1954 called. (Score:2)
Nobody Paving the way to Mars anytime soon (Score:2)
The distance between Earth and Mars varies widely and Pavement is rigid and non flexible.