Re: Space travel by humans is not possible now

On 21 Jan, 21:41, jacob navia <ja...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Fred J. McCall wrote:
Ian Parker <ianpark...@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!

It depends on what you mean by AI. If you mean do Spirit and
Opportunity need cognitive AI, the answer is a clear "no". If you ask
another question "Could you envisage a Mars exploration requiring
agility" I am here defining agility as meaning not being able to stop
immediately, and dynamic balance. When we walk we are in dynamic
balance. If you ask that question I think you would probably say "yes"
although those two missions do not require agility.

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...

I want to move hundreds of kilometers. I want to move out of the
Meridian Planum. To do that you require agility. AI is needed to avoid
obstacles. This AI is the sort of AI that we saw driving round Las
Vegas. I want to be cable of moving at Las Vegas type speeds on Mars.

ASs you say it is not F1 that we want, but we do need to think of
agile speeds.

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.

To dig really you need agility.

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.

Very true. Is there life on Mars. - There is now.
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.

The question of the development of robotics is a deeper one than just
Mars. It has been stated, correctly, that Mars is but one destination.
In many ways it has suprised me that robots are not more advanced than
they are. Up to now one problem has been that there was no software
framework. Every robot was developed from scratch. This is now
changing. Basically robotics is a problem in dynamics and Newton's
laws. Computers are not too bad at finding optimisations.

One thing that NASA/ESA can do and I think Airbus Industrie has done
it is to make hight performance software - like ProEngineer available
to schools and run competitions.

I am sure that there will be an agile robot within a short space of
time.


- Ian Parker
.

Relevant Pages

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