Future of space: Could robots really replace human astronauts? –
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7keddnj31o
Future of space: Could robots really replace human astronauts? –
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7keddnj31o
14 Comments
From the article
>Robots can contribute to that scientific research, with the ability to travel to locations inhospitable to humans, where they can use instruments to study and probe the atmospheres and surfaces.
>”Humans are more versatile and we get stuff done faster than a robot, but we’re really hard and expensive to keep alive in space,” says Dr Weinersmith.
>In her 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, author Samantha Harvey puts it more lyrically: “A robot has no need for hydration, nutrients, excretion, sleep… It wants and asks for nothing.”
>But there are downsides. Many robots are slow and methodical – for example on Mars, the rovers (remote-controlled motor vehicles) trundle along at barely 0.1mph.
>”AI can beat human beings at chess, but does that mean they’ll be able to beat human beings in exploring environments?” asks Dr Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at the University of London. “I just don’t think we know.”
>He does, however, believe that AI algorithms might enable rovers to be “more efficient”.
We’ve already had a number of robots exploring space. Without them, there would be NO WAY to explore the sun’s corona, the surface of Venus, the surface of Titan, or below the cloud tops of Jupiter and Saturn.
Yes, but will we want them too? We generally seem to value space exploration as a collective achievement. We still want to get someone to Mars eventually despite already exploring it with rovers.
Already did in the 90s.
Getting infrastructure to keep a team alive at even somewhere as close as Mars would take multiple launches, even for the largest currently in development launch vehicles. That’s multiple launches, multiple launch windows of delay, and then you have a small team of humans there for the time between one launch window and the return window.
Instead you could put down multiple tons of rover and lab equipment in the very first launch, start doing science years earlier, and keep doing science for a decade or more later, using the same launches.
No competition. You want humans here as much as you want horses drawing carts through the city.
They absolutely should. Advancements in telepresence, computation and data storage means we can reduce risks surrounding the harshness of space exploration
Human astronauts make the whole process more complicated
The only argument for human exploration is that of bragging rights
Send a bunch of advanced robots first, adjust and develop safely then send human crews when a majority of risks have been eliminated
This almost feels like a hostile takeover of the human species. Of course without all the biological limitations of humans, robots will be far more efficient and cheaper.
What’s the end goal here. Robots become so efficient that humans don’t need to be around anymore and they continue to takeover the galaxy without us.
Robots controlled by a human in a body suit interface, wearing virtual reality goggles.
Humans should all just die, as long as the achievement points are earned, who cares eh?
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What the heck is going on anymore? It’s already been done. What ya call a rover?
Yes before human colonise Mars, we will have to built millions of construction robots to Mars for terraforming.
Not fully, because part of the function of an astronaut is being able to say “we put a human on [whatever]”, and having someone comes back and tell inspiring stories about what it was like to experience.
Are robots indispensible, scientifically valuable, a traditional part of space exploration, and apart from anything else just cool? Certainly.
But by the time robots are sophisticated enough to do literally everything a human astronaut can do, they’ll be people in their own right. Which is probably still a way off yet, and likely presages the merger of our two species and the removal of any meaningful distinction between the two.
The mistake is to characterize this as robots replacing astronauts. The smarter way to frame this is that the robot is the spacesuit for the rest of us. It is the real CATS. It is the emancipator of space access. How mainstream society will finally get to participate. The hard reality is that most of us aren’t astronaut material and will never be. And for that reason alone it’s simply not a viable way to do work in space. If you’re a healthy young person aspiring to participate in space activity today, your odds of becoming an astronaut are, at best, about the same as becoming a professional sports superstar. It’s very difficult to meet the physical and training standards for that, and even when you do the costs of manned spaceflight makes its such a rare activity, only a small fraction of the people who have successfully trained to do it ever actually get the opportunity. We don’t hire olympic athletes in 10 million dollar outfits working a few hours a week at best to build houses. We’d all be homeless! How then do we expect to build a new branch of civilization in space? It makes no sense.
Your odds of becoming a telerobotics operator are pretty high and growing rapidly. Telerobots are spreading into evermore applications and people now do it as a hobby. Everyone who has a personal drone or uses VR is training for this. And now that drones have –sadly– become a common weapon of war, a lot of people are learning to use them that way. It’s something that, like using a PC, virtually anyone regardless of age or physical ability can learn to do. In fact, they’ve already become a liberator for people with severe disabilities. In the near-future, operating robots won’t even be thought of as a specialty field. Like using a PC, it will be a common prerequisite for a lot of fields of work where these machines have become common. And the long-term trend with the technology is progressively greater immersion and fine motor control. We now do surgery by telerobot. You can no longer argue that they can’t match humans in general capability.
Had we the sense to pursue a space telerobotics initiative when it first became a viable option, back in the late ’70s, rather than continuing to throw bodies at the void in the name of national prestige, we would now have millions of people routinely working in space today from the comfort of offices here on Earth. And that’s the level of activity all those big dreams for space development require. We’re never getting there with people in spacesuits.
Amature robotics is sufficiently accessible that, if you wanted to start your own personal space outpost development program as a hobby (a telebase program, as I call it), right now, today, you could actually do that. The model train layout of the 21st century. Minecraft with real stuff. The space agencies are currently so far behind the curve of development in telerobotics, you could –doing this just for the fun and challenge of it– actually contribute to real progress in this field. A far more attainable dream than chasing the fantasy of being an astronaut or hoping to become a billionaire.
This is the way it’s gotta be. Humans are too closely adapted to Earth conditions. Robots will do all the serious exploration and advance work. That and maybe custom designed biological or cybernetic organisms to suit the environment.