🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <rabjab.7.726624045@golem.ucsd.edu> rabjab@golem.ucsd.edu (rabjab) writes:
>If they don't find water on the moon, I have a hard time believing that
>there will ever be large colonies there...
>Mars will be the only real place for a large colony, but then again,
>if there isn't anything there that's very interesting (like life or
>fossils) I can't see large colonies being placed up there...
>Maybe in the next 100-200 years biology will advance to the point
>where Venus could be altered with microbes...

Why do you assume a colony must be on a *planet*?  As the late Gerard
O'Neill pointed out a number of years ago, this is an error.  Open space
is a *better* place to colonize, given availability of resources from
the Moon or the asteroids.

Also, why do you assume that colonies are motivated by research?  Not so.
Bases, yes, but not colonies.  Colonies are motivated by either money or
freedom, broadly and loosely speaking:  either there's a buck to be made
and permanent residents are cheaper than migratory workers, or else the
residents find life at home intolerable enough to spend a lot of money
going somewhere where they can run their lives their own way.

>Seems like the future will see expanding development of robotic systems
>that will be used to explore every planet and moon, at a vastly 
>reduced cost over sending humans.  

It is yet to be established that this can be done effectively, except
perhaps on the Moon where speed-of-light lags are short.  Just flying
around and taking pictures is the easy part.  Interacting with a complex
planetary surface, without minute-by-minute human attention, is vastly
more problematic.  None of the currently-proposed Mars robots, for
example, is going to have anywhere near the fossil-hunting efficiency
of even an amateur paleontologist.  Unless robotics improves greatly,
in-depth investigation of planetary surfaces will still require humans.

Note, also, that human space exploration need not be impossibly costly.
See, for example, Zubrin's "Mars Direct" proposal for a way of doing
*human* exploration of Mars, in depth, relatively soon, on a budget
that would barely buy you good robots at NASA prices.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry