Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3191-3195 (4th to 8th April 2016)
Undrneath:
I'm not sure of his position, though I believe he was speaking about physical capabilities specifically. However I'm sure they don't need to have full autonomy to be feasibly cost effective.
J:
once again, i must question the fact that bubbles is able to walk around with that sort of hardware.
danuis:
--- Quote from: Undrneath on 06 Apr 2016, 00:24 ---I'm not sure of his position, though I believe he was speaking about physical capabilities specifically. However I'm sure they don't need to have full autonomy to be feasibly cost effective.
--- End quote ---
Sure, true, true. I've seen the numbers as well. Literal rocket science, as a hobby, of course. They're some strong, hard heavy numbers, and you know what I say? Well, we know the numbers, now let's make something that can satisfy those numbers, cause those numbers are never going away. Har har.
swapna:
That is... interesting. Bubbles displayed her anger issues before, to the point of nearly hurting Faye. It also explains why the military doesn't use combat AIs any more (I don't think it was because of protests. Since when do they stop doing things because people don't like it?)
Bubbles is dangerous, and doesn't respond well to pressure; she also wouldn't go for therapy, I think. This is bad for a human, but in somebody who's already a walking weapon it might be more than they could risk.
Also, CW is a horrible peson, but she also is fearless. Provoking Bubbles some more could lead to her being broken in two and she just doesn't care.
jheartney:
--- Quote from: Penquin47 on 05 Apr 2016, 19:29 ---Main advantages humans have over rovers: intelligence and judgment. You can "program" a human with a lot more tasks at once than a rover, because if a human runs into an unforeseen development, they have training and judgment to decide how to proceed, rather than having to call home, wait while the scientists on Earth figure out what to do based on limited data, and receive new instructions.
Example: one of the Venus landers was supposed to extend a probe to test the compressability of the Venusian surface. Due to bad luck, it ended up measuring the compressability of the lens cap of its camera. For a human, this is a five-second fix - kick the lens cap out of the way or move the probe five centimeters thataway. For the lander, this was unsolvable.
--- End quote ---
The Venus landers are a great example of why you have to use probes rather than manned missions. There's absolutely no way, using current tech, that you could get a human down to the hellish surface of Venus, keep them alive there for any length of time, and get them back off the planet and out of its gravity well. Even if the example were the far more hospitable Mars, you could send a second, third and fourth probe, and keep them all going for years, for a fraction of what it would cost to send a human. It's why we haven't had a manned exploration mission outside near Earth orbit since Apollo, and why even in orbit the heavy lifting is done by unmanned devices.
The U.S. currently has no domestic manned space launch capability. The shuttle was hideously expensive, highly problematic (two disastrous fatal missions), and in the end had no important mission other than building the International Space Station. Of course the ISS' most important reason for being was to give the shuttle something to do. It was all circular and kind of dumb (though it made a lot of money for contractors spread over a large collection of congressional districts, the real reason the program kept going).
The question isn't whether or not you'd get some decent science out of a manned Mars mission. It's whether you couldn't get a lot more science out of the same budget applied to an unmanned approach.
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