This highlights that, with the sheer trouble it takes to keep humans alive in space and the general trajectory of technology, sending probes instead of humans it makes a lot more sense.
I mean, our automated probes are really freakin’ good now. And we get way more science and ‘TV clips’ back for the same investment. Why go to all the expense of figuring out hibernation so soon?
Well the goals of sending humans vs sending probes isn’t wholly the same. Humans part of the goal is study how humans live there and potentially try to make permanent, ideally self sustaining, habitats there
Not that the research shouldn’t be done, but I think it one should expect, say, humans to be genetically or cybernetically augmented by the time a sustained settlement is even on the horizon. Then what? What about autonomous systems that could set everything up ahead of time relatively trivially? These are all feasible compared to he immense cost of repeated interplanetary human space travel, and the sheer difficulty of keeping plain humans alive in space.
This highlights that, with the sheer trouble it takes to keep humans alive in space and the general trajectory of technology, sending probes instead of humans it makes a lot more sense.
I mean, our automated probes are really freakin’ good now. And we get way more science and ‘TV clips’ back for the same investment. Why go to all the expense of figuring out hibernation so soon?
Well the goals of sending humans vs sending probes isn’t wholly the same. Humans part of the goal is study how humans live there and potentially try to make permanent, ideally self sustaining, habitats there
That’s just so impractical at the moment though.
Not that the research shouldn’t be done, but I think it one should expect, say, humans to be genetically or cybernetically augmented by the time a sustained settlement is even on the horizon. Then what? What about autonomous systems that could set everything up ahead of time relatively trivially? These are all feasible compared to he immense cost of repeated interplanetary human space travel, and the sheer difficulty of keeping plain humans alive in space.
Where I’m coming from is something speculative like OA’s early timeline: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/486e75a54a1ae
And that the future doesn’t really look like Star Trek or Mass Effect, with plain humans running around and settling space.