Re: 'We choose to go to the moon'

wsnell01@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 20, 6:01 am, Martin Brown <|||newspam...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
wsnel...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Jul 15, 8:40 am, Chris L Peterson <c...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:39:25 -0700 (PDT), wsnel...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Robots also take months, if not
years, to cover small distances that humans can walk in a few minutes,
or hours at most.

Provided that they are able to stay live. Mars is not a very hospitable place and the surface of the moon is even worse.

Again, a very solvable engineering issue.
Not really. The robot would need a degree of autonomy and "decision
making" that isn't feasible yet and might not ever be. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA
Every time someone says that no computer will ever do X with a specific
concrete example it is typically about a decade before it becomes common
place. Famously in Roger Penrose's "Shadows of the Mind" in 1994 he
showed a chess puzzle that Deep Thought could not solve no matter what
the time limits. These days there are no commercial chess programs that
cannot solve it.

Ok, come up with a solar powered rover that can travel over rough,
rocky ground at 0.5 mph without human assistance and without getting
stuck, damaged or destroyed. Extra points awarded if it is able to
recognize something interesting, stop to take a sample, then move on,
again without human assistance. The trick is going to be defining
what we mean by "interesting."

You set the requirements too high. A rover can do multispectral imaging and some level of binocular vision. It's vision can extend well beyond the human visible range. Even with a single camera by moving it a known distance. The telemetry it sends back to Earth can be used to decide on the best course of action - that is pretty much how it is done today. It isn't immediate but it is effective.

Giving the thing a bit of autonomy to dither its course and spot interesting rocks that stand out in contrast on one of its cameras would not be that hard. An XRF elemental probe is possible and other scientific instruments can be hardened to survive the landing.

Using robots to work in hostile environments where we cannot function is standard practice on Earth. It makes sense to do the same in space and to design future space telescopes with robotic servicing in mind. Astronauts in pressure suits are unbelievably clumsy and drop tools with monotonous regularity.

And you can break the hardest CAPTCHAs with a very simple script and a
website. The mechanism is simple enough you offer a reward that appeals
to the sort of people you want to recruit in return for the answer.

I read about a company overseas that ran a CAPTCHA solving
"sweatshop." Not a good use of human labor, definitely counter-
productive.

Hardly a sweatshop. The most famous one relied on promising to show teen porn images to the volunteers who gave the right answer.

The other example where willing amateur astronomer volunteers are being used to classify images that are beyond the realistic capabilities of todays software and computing power is the galaxy zoo project:
http://zoo1.galaxyzoo.org/GalaxyAnalysis.aspx

If you know you have a problem where AI cannot hack the obvious solution is to use a human. The human does not need to be physically present they just need to see the relevant data.

You don't need a robot with huge autonomy or massive visual pattern
matching skills just one with enough basic knowledge to move around
safely to places that humans have picked out as interesting.



There really are no mechanical reasons to send people- robots will
always do better. The only thing that people do better is to think
creatively. But it isn't clear that thinking creatively on the surface
of Mars really brings significant advantages to a scientific mission.
Thinking creatively isn't important in science? That's a unique
perspective!
On the surface of Mars you need decent sensors and telemetry. The
creative part can be done by scientists on the ground. Astronomers do
not physically visit the HST to make their observations!

Both computer chess and images from the HST are two dimensional, and
only representations of physical objects, whereas rocks, soil,
craters, chasms are real and three dimensional.

The full 3D world model need not exist in the probe. It could be given instructions from the Earth. Machine vision is one of those deceptively easy sounding difficult problems.

Humans on Mars could control several robots remotely and in real
time. If anything went wrong, they could suit up and go fix the
problem, and investigate in person anything interesting that the robot
finds. Even from Mars orbit, they could at least control the robots
more readily than anyone could from Earth.
Humans on Mars would have to be tended by robots until they regained
their ability to function again in a planets gravity. They would spend
all their time just trying to stay alive. It would be like an up market
version of "Big Brother".

We don't know much about the long term effects of either 1/6 gravity
(Moon) or 1/3 gravity (Mars) on people. Humans might do OK in 1/3
gravity even after months of weightlessness, and recuperate quickly
enough to handle the eventual return to Earth's gravity. A Moon base

We know from past experience that after a few months in space they have to be stretchered off the return vehicle.

might demonstrate that relatively small amounts of artificial gravity
are sufficient to protect human bones and cardiovascular systems. We
won't know unless we try.

I agree on this point. A base on the Moon would be interesting.

I reckon the people of Earth should aim to return to the original US lunar landing site at Tanquility Base (give or take a mile or so) to celebrate the 50th anniversary of that massive acheivement.

But I see no point whatsoever with our present technology in sending a bunch of people off to die slowly on a six month voyage to Mars.

Regards,
Martin Brown
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Bigelows BA300 as a Martian spaceship?
    ... Smithsonian archives with the superior William Moon mind that knows ... cost more propellant *and* keep you in space longer. ... to a: earth escape trajectory. ... A Mars Free Return Trajectory entails boosting with enough speed to ...
    (sci.space.policy)
  • Re: Ice on Mars South Pole Is Deep and Wide
    ... they should be talking to us about our somewhat salty old moon that's ... life might have once upon a time existed on Mars, ... An Earth w/o magnetosphere, w/o moon is simply a much larger Mars. ... Even if we're talking 1% Earth wet, Mars is missing most of its salt. ...
    (sci.space.policy)
  • Re: Giant alien head on the tarmac
    ... Xerxes, was the king of Mars, ... And so my mother, who married Zeus, was one of Xerxes' daughters. ... So about 65 million years ago, they fly the moon here to earth. ...
    (sci.astro)
  • Re: We choose to go to the moon
    ... years, to cover small distances that humans can walk in a few minutes, ... The telemetry it sends back to Earth can be used to decide on ... Using robots to work in hostile environments where we cannot function is ... of Mars really brings significant advantages to a scientific mission.. ...
    (sci.astro.amateur)
  • Re: Life on Mars =
    ... Even though "Mars and Earth share the same atomic chemistry in the ... forced moon of sufficient mass nearby. ... What ever happened to most all the salt of Mars? ...
    (sci.astro.seti)
Loading