“My increasingly sophisticated laptops are starting to develop personalities of their own,” says Charles Lineweaver (Australian National University), as interviewed by Peter Spinks in The Age. It’s a whimsical remark in the context of a discussion on robotics in space missions, but I think many of us can relate to it. We all tend to anthropomorphize at the drop of a hat, reading motives and reactions into the routine habits of our pets that may say more about us than about them. Maybe making things seem human is an essential part of what being human is.
It’s worth thinking about all this given the successes as well as the limitations of robotic technologies. I’m all in favor of both robotics and a robust manned program, but right now deep space is a machine’s game, and budget realities tell me it will remain so for the foreseeable future. That being the case, and again, with our tendency to anthropomorphize our machinery, there was a certain frisson associated with Curiosity’s breathtaking arrival on Mars. Controllers could only watch, given the distances involved, as sophisticated machinery put its survival on the line, and the joy at JPL after touchdown pegged Curiosity as, in its own way, one of us.
Image: Curiosity’s view of the base of Mt. Sharp. How long will it be before human crews work in this kind of environment? Credit: NASA/JPL.
Because both humans and robot craft have a place in space exploration, working out which does what best is important when the target is a relatively close Mars. On that score, the strengths of Curiosity and future robotic explorers are clear enough. It’s hard to call a $2.5 billion rover expendable unless you’ve first gotten every bit of data return you can from it, but we can still take chances with rovers we wouldn’t dare run with humans, and there’s no built-in return imperative either. The lack of life support allows us to maximize payload, and even a hostile environment like Mars has proven surprisingly workable for several generations of rovers.
Even so, Spinks’ article quotes Jon Clarke (Geoscience Australia) on why humans are very much in the game:
“Unmanned spacecraft and planetary rovers are very useful, and are superior to direct human presence for several tasks, such as for orbital imagery or acting as ground stations,” Dr Clarke explains. “But as the complexity of a mission increases, the difficulty of achieving it with an unmanned system goes up exponentially.”
Scientific exploration of planetary surfaces is one of the most difficult tasks imaginable, he says. “While specific tasks can be automated, the integrated replacement of the entire human being is very difficult, and perhaps impossible.”
I’ve written before about Ian Crawford’s views on robotics. Crawford (Birkbeck College, London) points to the decision-making capabilities of human beings on the surface of the Moon, where we explored six different sites and returned 382 kilograms of lunar material. Yes, we can envision a Mars sample-return mission, or similar returns from exotic places like Enceladus, but the sheer diversity of the Apollo samples is impossible to top robotically, at least at today’s level of development. Over 2000 lunar locations were sampled in the course of Apollo’s work.
In a recent paper on the subject, Crawford points to the robotic sample return missions and contrasts them with Apollo in terms of scientific papers generated:
…a large part of the reason why Apollo has resulted in many more publications than the Luna missions is due to the much larger quantity and diversity of the returned samples which, as we have seen, will always be greater in the context of human missions. The third point to note is that, despite being based on data obtained and samples collected over 40 years ago, and unlike the Luna, Lunokhod, or Surveyor publications, which have clearly levelled off, the Apollo publication rate is still rising. Indeed, it is actually rising as fast as, or faster than, the publications rate derived from the Mars Exploration Rovers, despite the fact that data derived from the latter are much more recent. No matter how far one extrapolates into the future, it is clear that the volume of scientific activity generated by the MERs, or other robotic exploration missions, will never approach that due to Apollo.
All this from a total of only 12.5 days on the lunar surface (and that figure includes down-time in the Lunar Module — the cumulative EVA time was a fleeting 3.4 days). Even Steve Squyres, principal investigator for the wildly successful Spirit and Opportunity rovers, is on record as saying “The unfortunate truth is that most things our rovers can do in a perfect sol [Martian day] a human explorer could do in less than a minute.” A human future in space seems inevitable for maximum science return, but clearly the machines go first.
Whether the humans follow at all may be a function of distance. While I feel sanguine about getting human crews to many Solar System targets eventually, it’s a real question whether moving beyond the Solar System will ever involve biological beings, an issue we looked at yesterday in the context of David Brin’s novel Existence. I’m convinced that robotic missions with sophisticated artificial intelligence will someday be launched to nearby stars, and we can hope that the kinds of advances we’ve seen in computing in our lifetimes will continue into generations of extraordinarily capable robot craft that can mimic human capabilities.
That’s asking a lot of robotics, but we get better at this with every successful mission. The problem of biology, though, ramps up the harder we choose to push it. Putting humans into deep space inevitably invokes the problem of self-contained habitats, about which we have so much to learn that even a manned flight to nearby Mars challenges our capabilities. While we work out these issues, robotic exploration proceeds without need of biological life support and capable of ever more sophisticated operations. There is no winner or loser in this game, for we can create the tools to send us data about environments to which we can’t yet travel, all the while developing the technologies that could make a sustainable human presence in space a reality.
Ian Crawford’s paper is “Dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency: why human space exploration will tell us more about the Solar System than will robotic exploration alone,” Astronomy and Geophysics Vol. 53 (2012), pp. 2.22-2.26 (abstract).