Re: Space travel by humans is not possible now

Fred J. McCall wrote:
Ian Parker <ianparker2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
:
:I think there is something else at work here too. If you take a look
:at technology there is indeed only one sensible conclusion you can
:come to. :

Yes, there is. And you fail to come to it.

:
:Robotics will give human manual dexterity in a fairly short
:time period. To me this is inescapable. :

To me this is largely irrelevant, since there is a lot more required
than a relatively dexterous hand.


Of course. The rest of what is required is furnished by the human
OPERATOR of the robot, safe on earth.

[snip arrogant verbiage]


:
:One might ask - why not take the next step, why not try to
:equip it with AI?
:

Only if one is an ignorant git. The obvious answer is "Because 'AI'
isn't ready for anything other than routine tasks and if it screws up
and punches a hole in the station we all die."


There is NO need for A.I!

Neither Spirit nor Opportunity need any A.I. because the natural intelligence of Dr Squyres and his team makes the perfect match for
the brainless robot!

Dr Squyres is driving those robots 4 years now, and no need for A.I. has
risen. They can be perfectly steered from earth, they got out of
treacherous moving sands, from sticky terrain, they have been able to
climb hundreds of meters (Spirit), investigate during months craters in
Meridiani planum...

They have demonstrated that exploring Mars is feasible with robots in an
incredible small budget, i.e. less than a single shuttle flight.

But people here go on ignoring this FACTS.

The human exploration program is too expensive and brings no scientific
results.

There is NOTHING a human in Mars would do better than an advanced
robot like the ones are planed for the next missions. Of course
humans would do MUCH less and with much more dangers to US here in
earth.

Mars life is probably underground, where conditions are much better than
in the surface. It has had time to adapt to very cold conditions,
billions of years of evolution.

If life in earth is of any guide, they could resemble desert life:
they live in a sleeping state until conditions improve, then,
when conditions change they grow exponentially until the good
conditions stop.

The very long cycles of the Mars orbit, (measured in time frames
of 10-50 thousand earth years) allow conditions to change to good
conditions during short periods.

What could happen when those life forms arrive on Earth, riding
piggy back in a human astronaut?

They would reproduce exponentially until the bad conditions
arrive again, but... here on earth there are no bad conditions!

We risk a lot more with humans over there since they have to
come back! Robots are a ONE WAY process, and we can send
them safely because they are not coming back.

Besides the whole scientific interest of exploring Mars is
GONE with humans since they will pollute the planet immediately
with earth bacteria, fungi and other parasites they have in
their skin. We can't sterilize humans. We can sterilize a
robot though.


All this considerations are not even addressed by McCall and Co.

"Just send a rocket pal"...

Hints of Mars life is the methane emissions, detected by the
European Mars Express. That spaceship also detected
a glacier, a frozen lake and many places where life
could thrive.



--
jacob navia
jacob at jacob point remcomp point fr
logiciels/informatique
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~lcc-win32
.

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