"For those of us who dreamed of trips to Mars, the trouble with our times, as Paul Valery once said, is that the future is not what it used to be."
March 3, 2011 4:22 AM   Subscribe

 
Given limited cash supplies, NASA knows robots do it better for at least the rest of the 21st century.

And the romanticism of human exploration kind of rubs me the wrong way. Having taught high school, kids get a hell of a lot more excited over robots than they do the falsely projected boomer fantasies of putting human feet on a big, lifeless rock. Lest we forget, the Space Race was a military endeavor above all else.
posted by bardic at 5:09 AM on March 3, 2011


Robots taking all our space-jobs, you say?
posted by tumid dahlia at 5:30 AM on March 3, 2011


Well, if you want to know what planetary scientists actually want to do, pay attention to the Decadal Survey being released this weekend at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

NASA PLANETARY DECADAL SURVEY 2013–2022
Visions and Voyages: Planetary Science in the Coming Decade

The Decadal Survey will be broadcast live at www.livestream.com/2011LPSC.
posted by zamboni at 5:47 AM on March 3, 2011


...kids get a hell of a lot more excited over robots than they do the falsely projected boomer fantasies of putting human feet on a big, lifeless rock.

It's hard to get excited about something that seems unlikely to ever happen. Whereas you can actually build a robot, if you want.
posted by DU at 5:51 AM on March 3, 2011


Robots: Coming from the past to kill our future.
posted by blue_beetle at 5:56 AM on March 3, 2011


the Decadal Survey being released this weekend

By which I mean Monday.
posted by zamboni at 6:02 AM on March 3, 2011


This is a perfect example of why the Singularity isn't going to happen. Except for two or three areas of technology, we are on the far end of the sine curve that defines rate of technological advancement. Overall there was far more change in technology and lifestyles in the first half of the 20th century than in the second. Singularity fans tend to miss this fact because they tend to be computer geeks; but even then we're still using interfaces that were designed 30+ years ago.

All the easy advances are done. It's nice that we can look forward to robot space exploration, but that means we're just catching up to where we were predicted to be twenty years ago.
posted by happyroach at 8:10 AM on March 3, 2011 [1 favorite]


Still waiting for this.
posted by Fizz at 10:24 AM on March 3, 2011




Alright!
posted by XhaustedProphet at 12:45 AM on March 4, 2011


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