NASA has an “Artemis mission” planned. The goal is to establish a permanent moon base. But I don’t see what we can do there that we can’t do with robots. We’d have to provide space for people to live, and food, and water, and all that stuff. Not even mentioning 1/6 gravity isn’t exactly healthy.
I’d rather we just send robots to the moon and do what we need to do there until we can easily build huge habitats for people.
There’s several financial incentives. There’s the advertising value , helium 3, (a rare isotope on earth, which can cost more than $15,000 per gram, used in a ton for physics experiments, airport security systems also need large amounts of it and the supply on earth is limited. Given the vastly larger concentrations of helium 3 on the moon, it eventually will make sense to mine for it.
And there’s tons of other stuff there too, like look at the 4% titanium dioxide percentage in the maria there
if nothing else its just generally cool to go to the moon
But I don’t see what we can do there that we can’t do with robots.
Robots cant do everything, and even if robots are going to do the majority of the work there, it makes sense for people to be involved. Like what if one of the robots breaks down.
This argument that is about as old as space travel itself. But just consider what the Mars rovers have achieved in the last few decades. I don’t want to in any way diminish the fantastic achievements of NASA and the Mars rover programs. But the fact remains that human explorers could have done all that and much more in a couple of weeks at most. And there’s a lot of things that still haven’t been achieved, like drilling a hole. That would take a person a few minutes to do. All our current knowledge of Mars goes just a few centimetres deep. The really interesting stuff likely is under the surface.
As for why we should go there in the first place, the answer is resources. Lifting stuff out of earth’s gravity well is very difficult and expensive. Once we manage to create rocket fuel on the moon, the entire solar system becomes far more accessible. It would also enable large scale construction in earth orbit, if we could source raw materials on the moon.
Finally, and unfortunately, there’s the geostrategic dimension. Of course it would be nice to live in a world where we could all just get along but that is not how it is. Not building a presence on the moon would mean ceding it to China and you can be damn sure Dear Leader Xi would use the leverage this would provide him with.
As for why we should go there in the first place, the answer is resources. Lifting stuff out of earth’s gravity well is very difficult and expensive.
This is true, but not something to be done without great care, for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Obviously. But the only way to figure it out is to go do it.
There is one thing that robots can’t do in full: test how humans can live outside the Earth.
One of our long term goals, as a species, should be to become multi planetary. This fits with our instincts, that spread us all around the planet. To this end, the moon is an excellent test bed. It is far enough away to justify being as self sustaining as possible. But close enough that evacuation back to earth or emergency resupply from earth is reasonable.
There are also financial goals. The moon has easy access to resources that are very useful. Some to earth directly (e.g. helium 3 for fusion reactors) some for space.(E.g. water and low gravity for rocket fuel production). It’s basically a launch pad to deeper space.
As for why humans. Simply put, robots aren’t yet up to the task of heavy construction. We will need people locally, if only for low lag control. At that point, the extra support structures scale up quite efficiently.
The human element might change with time. But it’s a chicken and the egg type problem. Until we have the tech, we will need humans in the loop. However, we likely won’t develop the tech without extended experience working on another body.
As for Artemis, it’s a first step mission. It’s not even the foundation of what we will want to build long term. It’s the breaking ground so the foundations can be planned out. It’s pure science and trailblazing. It will be decades before we see the true return on the investment. But without the investment, that will just be put off more and more.
You’re technically correct, but I think there’s a philosophical question that gets left out of the discussion:
Is humanity worth saving?
Having met a fair number of humans, the answer is not an obvious and enthusiastic “yes”.
Humanity has a lot of flaws, however, in my opinion, it’s still a lot better than nothing. We can work on improving what we have.
Humans as they are now might not, but what about future generations? What about evolutionary descendants?
I agree. Humans are an invasive species
Agreed, though we can also (potentially) act as an interplanetary “pioneer” species.
To be invasive implies an existing population to invade. The other planets don’t have life, best we can tell.
Plant life :p But it would be nice if, by the time we do reach interplanetary travel, we do not have to live off the land we visit.
We would live of the land, but it would be the land itself, not the life growing from it.
There are 2 reasons here.
- Science. There’s a lot of science to be done up there, and robots can really only manage a few experiments at a time. Humans are general-purpose robots who can adapt and improvise and manage lots of different projects at the same time.
- Exploration/inspiration. I think a big part of this is an attempt to rekindle interest in space exploration/science in general. ‘Hey, a robot found some neat stuff on the moon’ is interesting, but ‘Hey there are people living up there and they’ve found some neat stuff on the moon’ is a lot more engaging and inspirational.
Establishing a human populated base attracts attention and money. It’s not rational, but we humans rarely are rational. We get inspired by grand silly gestures like moon bases. It gives us hope. This hope literally helps us pay for the fuel and the R&D costs. We need lots of new technology and a lot of fuel to build that moon base. All of that technology will improve our lives here.
The brutal difficulties of space helps us recognize how good we have it here on Earth. It highlights the importance of conservation efforts.
That you, Elon?
Should we ever decide to go to other planets like Mars, the Moon is a lower cost, safer place to demo the tech first.
The space race created a shit load of scientific advancements that we take for granted today. And they significantly improve our quality of life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies
We weren’t able to get humans to the moon without these breakthroughs. So we made them. We’re not going to be able to have a permanent base on the moon without breakthroughs. So we will make them.
