Re: Burt Rutans plans for a manned mission to Mars



Fred J. McCall wrote:

"Jeff Findley" <jeff.findley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

:
:"Fred J. McCall" <fmccall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message :news:p5dm62lndtvuvv5npflk4ek194fberv7f2@xxxxxxxxxx
:> It ought to be obvious to anyone who even bothers to look and isn't
:> living in total denial that $5k is plenty of incremental cost to
:> automate your experiment.
:
:How much money you have to spend depends a lot on the experiment, doesn't :it? If the experiment involves simple observation then a camera and a data :recorder is sufficient. However, I'd imagine not all experiments are this :simple to automate.
:
:One thing that a person has that's very hard to replicate in hardware and :software is vision. Shape recognition is still something computers have a :very hard time with. So if an experiment involves shape recognition in :order to determine when to trigger the next step of the experiment, your :software costs just went up by orders of magnitude over an experiment that :involves turning on a camera and logging the video to a data logger.

Shape recognition isn't that difficult. If all the indications of
your experiment are both subtle and purely visual (pretty preposterous
for a well-designed experiment, frankly), then you teleoperate. Still
cheaper than sending that grad student.

There is no doubt that many experiments can be made by automation
and/or teleoperation. For other experiments it is next to impossible
to do so.

About three years ago at the research center where I work we bought
robots to do some genetic work. The whole package (different kinds
of robots doing different kinds of jobs) costs a few 100k$ and they
need lab technicians to operate them, mainly to get stuff from one
robot to the next, but that is very severely oversimplifying the
technicians work. How much would it cost to have the whole process
automated? I don't know, but my guess is that if it could be done
for a few k$ they wouldn't be selling the robots that currently do
only part of the job.

There is also the issue of what people will be willing to do. It
would be much cheaper to have a big world web conference rather
than having 1000 people from all over the world to all go to
Cagliari in Italy next fall. Yet, I'm going to Cagliari. Yes I
could find a hundred reasons why it is better to have a real
life meeting than a web meeting. If it was at all possible to
do, I could also put my mind to it and find many reasons why
it should be done in orbit rather than in Cagliari. And a grad
student can find many reasons why his experiment would be better
if he is in orbit with it. The experiments that get done are
the ones that the experimenters want to do and that could well
be the ones with people in orbit.


Alain Fournier

.

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