As someone who has generally supported human space travel, I think the article raised some very valid arguments against it. I have heard many of the counterarguments to human spaceflight before, and I still agree with a lot of the pro-human exploration side. However, this perspective was interesting and, in its own way, valid. I do not think either side of the argument is completely “right.” Both sides make fair points.
by TraditionalAd6977
14 Comments
I do think treading new ground should be the priority for manned space flight. Land on something new for a change. If we put people back on the moon we’re just getting back to where we were nearly 60 years ago.
While most science is likely to be done by remote probes and other instruments human space flight is important because it creates the awe that keeps those projects funded.
The primary case to send humans to space has always been to let humans experience space. That reason is not shrinking. It’s exactly the same as it’s always been. Humans have always been optional from a technical standpoint.
Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, did not pilot or operate his capsule at all. It was fully automated. The US had multiple fully automated soft landings on the moon before Neil Armstrong landed. Human occupants on space vehicles have never been strictly needed.
We send people because we want people to go.
i think there’s a pool of thousands of images from this mission that only exist because one of four onboard humans said “hey this looks neat. Lemme get my camera” that prooves that humans in space are far from obsolte.
So many awe-inspiring, interesting discoveries no machine could ever actually make.
“Congratulations to Columbus for traveling west to the indies and safely returning, but we had more pressing concerns here at home. The case for sending people there again is rapidly shrinking”
1. Their timelines for hordes of unsupervised and unmaintained builder-miner super bots roving around the Moon are **wildly** unrealistic.
2. People like to go to places. Even impractical places. We will continue trying to get there, and we will keep going there even after it’s been done. People still go to Australia for Pete’s sake.
We need to explore the universe or we will just be another chapter of the Earth and our solar system. We could be a lot more if we put any effort into it. And I’d love to see a similar article about the case for killing millions of people abroad and how we can still justify every day spending money on that as a country, as a species. These articles and headlines are ridiculous. Arguing against the minuscule progress our overlords have *allowed* us to make is crazy to me. I can’t imagine any higher purpose than exploring the universe that has allowed us to exist for the moment.
No, it’s not. Exploration always has been and always will be a deeply human endeavor. Plus, missions like Artemis get people interested in science, which is always good.
Similar things can and were said about all frontiers: Antarctica, oceans, caves, etc.
The “advancement of robots” is not a new argument, I’ve heard that weekly since I got into aerospace engineering about 25 years ago. But generalist media need to write new articles, I guess.
The case isn’t shrinking because there was never one to begin with, human space exploration was always an “extreme sport” that doesn’t add anything practical to mankind (sure, investments in it have real repercussions, I’m an aerospace engineer and I work on human space exploration so the benefits are very real to me, it pays my bills 😂, but let’s focus on the direct impact of putting a man on the moon or on Mars or even just in leo), yet the same could be said of winning the Olympics, winning a Nobel prize in literature or building an art museum. Humans are humans because sometimes we tackle challenges because we can, not because there is a strong case for it. Running a marathon is absolutely the most pointless thing a man can do in 2026, there is literally zero need to run a marathon and people training for a marathon incur a huge waste of time, energy, and personal resources that they could spend in infinitely better ways, yet people who run a marathon are fucking awesome.
Human space exploration was always and always will be (at least in our lifetime) something that is done for the sake of it.
In this sense, the case is as strong today as it was in 1968.
What we learned from sending humans into space is that humans do really poorly in space. We need to develop a lot of technology before we can consider extended missions anywhere outside earth. That would include shielding, gravity, and velocities so that we can get somewhere and back in a human lifetime. All solvable problems, but we’re a long way from the solutions.
The Guardian has become trash. The em dash looks like an AI trained on junior high book report day. Gone are the days the writers in media attracted anyone with the understanding and interest in the need for risk taking necessary for innovation to happen. They’re not doers. They’re complainers about the action side of humanity. It’s as if the only people doing that writing today are wealthy trust fund kids on a permanent couch surfing gap year and no one with an interesting life experience can afford to be in those roles anymore.
We have a fault in this arrangement for outsourcing opinions to the bums with a pen. Any time we mindlessly parrot what the nepo bum said at a backyard party we should kick ourselves for being so lazy. Holding higher standards is a necessary part of getting a higher quality of journalism and we do not demonstrate we deserve it, yet. You don’t have to feed the problem. Can take action by forcing pressure on higher quality. Discarding poor quality submissions. Writing to a higher standard and sharing it when found. Going directly to the industries involved and sharing content from the flat engineering structures that move the world toward new discovery. I’m doing my part, panning the bum with a pen as the modern paparazzi complainers they are. The rhetorical extortionists. We can all write higher quality, daily, online. And have a responsibility to push back on lazy rhetorical molotov throwers as they shake down businesses for rents, everyone can do that. What if everybody did that? We would have no nice things. You may feel tired of that 2020s racket in all its forms, too.
It’s a little too optimistic about the pace of tech evolving, imo, and it’s only focused on a very specific use case for human space exploration. It doesn’t touch on the desire or potential need to be able to establish and sustain human populations on other planets.
They’re not wrong about the billionaires though.
These are essentially the same arguments that have been made for decades. “Robots are cheaper.” “Robots have gotten better.” “Safety first.”
None of this is new.
The best I can say is that robots have become even cheaper than before and are even better than before.
However, the primary problem remains: robots cannot replace the human ability to improvise, reevaluate plans, and be creative. As close as the moon is, it is still too laggy to be able to properly control robots in real time. Everything has to be planned out carefully, and if one step goes a little wrong, then the whole thing fails.
Now when AI is far enough along that it is actually replacing people in this way, the story changes. Perhaps the article is “right” without knowing why they are correct. I think it will take a little longer than that, but perhaps 20 to 30 years it might actually, finally, be possible to send AI and robots out to do the work. But when all that happens, the world is going to be a much different place anyway, so all bets are off what any of this means.
Articles like this always strike me as written by people who are too afraid or physically unable to be on the frontier, but don’t like it when other people do it. It always smacks a little of controlling jealousy with a thin veneer of “financial responsibility” that is frankly not very convincing.