Questions about "The High Frontier"

On Tue, 06 Nov 2007 16:56:46 GMT, Bryan Derksen
wrote:

Hop David wrote:
The human hand is an amazing tool. At first M.C. Escher thought his
hands wouldn't be able to meet the demands of his circle limit prints.
But then he discovered with eyesight enhanced by magnifying lens, his
hands were capable of extremely sure, minute movements. Besides doing
fine minute work hands can also help swing a sledge hammer. Closing my
eyes, I move my hands about and can still tell what position they're in.
They send back other information like pressure against the skin,
temperature, texture, etc.

Again, the comparison isn't quite fair. This isn't a contest between a
robot hand and a human hand, it's a contest between a robot hand and a
human hand _in a spacesuit glove_.

Not necessarily. Routine mining operations are usually done by heavy
machinery, which can be teleoperated so long as the operator is within
a fraction of a light-second. And for major repairs, the machinery has
to be pulled off-line and might as well be shifted to a pressurized
workshop.

Spacesuited hands will still be required for some jobs, especially
minor fixes, but that will probably represent a modestly small
fraction of the total work to be done.


And again, a robot hand may be inferior to a human hand in terms of
dexterity, but in terms of cost it's a lot cheaper. That's my main point
here. The tool arm on a MER is vastly inferior to a human arm in terms
of physical capabilities, but the cost of putting a couple of human arms
on Mars to do geological work is many orders of magnitude greater.

If by "many", you mean "two". Even Bush the Elder's Space Exploration
Initiative, which basically ammounted to promising NASA a blank check
and asking for everything on the wish list, couldn't figure out how to
outspend the MER program by three orders of magnitude.

However, even the actual PI for the MER program, freely acknowledges
that a single human geologist would be about three orders of magnitude
more productive than one of his rovers.


Really, the only actual justification for *robots* in space is that
you can't slice off a thousandth of a human and get any useful work
from the resulting ounce of flesh. There are lots of jobs where what
needs to be done, would occupy about a thousandth of a human, and if
sending the robot costs a hundredth as much as sending and retrieving
the person, that's what you do.

But pretty much everyone involved in actual space operations, *even
the most enthusiastic practitioners of robotic exploration*, freely
acknowledges that once you've got enough work to occupy a pair of
astronauts, you send the astronauts. Probably four, just to be
safe, and you're still coming out well ahead of the robots.


The only people who have a problem with this, are the ones for whom
antipathy to manned spaceflight is a higher priority than any positive
goal.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

Pat Flannery schrieb:


Matthias Warkus wrote:

Apparently you never read Adam Smith.

Adam Smith lived with his mother, and thought that free trade and wages
must never be restrained by any sort of government interference.

Nonsense.

Among other things, Smith advocates that government agencies collect
road tolls (WoN V 1.3.1), that the state tax all rentable capital,
albeit in a modest manner (WoN V 2.2), yet that some exportations can be
made partially tax-exempt (WoN IV 4). He also argues in favour of
Crown-owned parks and gardens, government-supported banks and officially
regulated fiat money.

Overall, "Wealth of Nations" is a remarkably moderate book that does not
call for any sort of extreme economical or political measure. Most
proposals it contains are based on contemporary examples. There is no
Utopian component whatsoever to it.

mawa

Mike Combs wrote:
"Pat Flannery" wrote
I still like how everyone is saying robots aren't advancing because they
can barely walk.

No, we understand your point about how robots will not necessarily be
humanoid. What we're saying is based on the fact that you can't find
any industrial examples where robots are doing everything themselves
without the assistance of humans on-site.

But every industrial example that one could possibly put forward is
located here on Earth, where the assistance of humans on-site is
extremely cheap compared to the assistance of humans on-site on the Moon
or Mars. It doesn't make economic sense to replace all humans with
robots down here.

Note that Robby isn't walking around on Mars at the moment, but a pair of
robots have been exploring things up there for 45 months now,

It could be that running an entire industry is more complicated than
a limited-scope scientific investigation.

What exactly are the industrial goals? They could could run the gamut
from "catapult buckets of raw regolith into orbit" to "manufacture iPods
for market and the rockets to carry them there", so without getting more
specific it's impossible to make a reasonable comparison.

Hop David wrote:

Recently I was replacing a screw on my eyeglass hinge. At one point I
dropped the screw. Hearing it hit the floor, I quickly turned my eyes
toward the direction of the sound to see it bounce and roll in a
corner. It was easy to retrieve it.

This would not have been possible had I been using teleoperated hands
with a 2.5 second delay.

Actually being there is a distinct advantage that telepresence,
especially distant telepresence, cannot fully replicate.

So let me get this straight... if you dropped a 2 mm long screw on the
lunar surface you are just going to reach down there with your pressure
suite glove and pick it up? You might want to try a magnet first,
(mayhaps mounted on a "Luumba") or get one of those $1.00 eyeglass
repair kits at WalMart. Better yet, you may want to not to build probes
that use 2mm long screws on them without Loktite, or wear your helmet
the next time you take a walk on the lunar surface.
If you have tiny screws that can fall out and seriously damage
equipment, then somebody at the design end has been screwing up badly.



But if you're going to be designing these extraterrestrial mining
machines with these capabilities either way, why _not_ make them
autonomous?

Well, I consider such robust A.I. rather implausible science fiction.
I could read a yarn employing this device with WSOD, but I don't
expect it to come to pass.

I'm still keen to hear the technical details of those
super-economical/super efficient rockets of yours that are gong to drop
spaceflight cost be a order of magnitude or so.


The robots will be there either way, IMO it's the humans
that are "extra" and need to be economically justified.


I find it hard to believe that the sense of smell would be so
useful in
space construction that it'd justify the cost of putting humans up
there.

I included smell in a list of things that are hard to replicate with
telepresence. Did you think I was saying the sense of smell alone
justifies the cost?


No, but just because it's hard to replicate with telepresence doesn't
mean telepresence won't still be adequate to the particular job at hand.
A teleoperated robot would probably also suck at playing a violin, but
that's not really important for mining operations.

And I would say a mine mechanic needs dexterity on par with a violinist.

You never dug a hole with a shovel did you? Violin caliber work that
ain't; which is why you can hire 6-year-old kids to shovel your sidewalk
in winter.


Miners need common sense and ingenuity to deal with the many
manifestations of Murphy's law that constantly crop up. I don't see
teleoperated robots or autonomous robots by themselves as being
adequate to be competent miners.

How many miners down in the shafts in Tennessee have a doctor's degree
in coal mining?




Here's a page describing how NASA's working on an artificial nose for
use in detecting chemical leaks on board the ISS because the human nose
isn't good enough:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/06oct_enose.htm

If we really need to detect and analyze vapors, machines are already
quite good at that. They're not yet as versatile as human noses, but who
needs versatility? They're there to do a specific job.

Even given many hours using telesenses, a user won't acquire the ease
of use of our native senses. And, again, an onsite worker would have
access to his native senses as well as machine enhanced senses.

So the astronaut-miner is going to go sniffing around in a _vacuum_?


But robots only are insufficient to do the mining and manufacturing
operations proposed in "The High Frontier", in my opinion.

Hop, it's a book...it's not the Holy Bible.
This is what I was getting at when I was talking about books that
screwed up people's minds.
(and come to think of it, the Bible has got to be right up there as a
leader in that category, particularly "The Book Of Revelation")
It was a speculation from a long time ago about what the future was
going to be like in one person's opinion, not revealed perfect truth
from above.
It's in the same league as Wells' "The Shape Of Things To Come"

Pat

Bryan Derksen wrote:

RTGs are pretty expensive, when shooting out lots of small, cheap probes
it'd probably be more cost effective to go with solar even in the polar
regions and just accept the more limited operating conditions. Mars
Polar Lander and the recently-launched Phoenix lander both used solar
panels.


We do have a RTG powered rover coming up at some future point; I was
concerned about the total amount of amps needed to run the drive
wheels...you could spend a few days building up power in the batteries
to move it several dozen feet, although a steerable solar array mounted
atop the vehicle could be aimed straight at the sun with only a little
power loss due to the thin atmosphere even quite a ways from the equator
where the sun is low in the sky.
One big advantage of the RTG is that you can keep the insides of the
rover warm with it during the very cold nights in the far north or south.
The Soviets used radio isotope decay to heat the insides of the
Lunokhods during the two-week-long lunar night, and IIRC the MERs use
small isotope heaters to keep critical parts of their insides warm also.
The present design of the MER's would have to be improved though to
cover the whole surface though at the same weight.
as designed now, they can only operate at low-lying areas near the
equator due to the fact they use parachutes to cut a lot of their entry
speed and have fixed upward pointing solar arrays to get their power.
Of course they went there via Delta II's, which are to be retired.*
Delta IVs or Atlas Vs can carry a lot more weight to the planet.

* I think retiring the Delta II is a very stupid idea, but would love to
have a time machine that could take me back the 1950's so I could tell
the people designing the Thor IRBM that its much-evolved offspring was
going to be putting rovers on Mars.
That would have completely blown their minds. :-D


The swarms of cheap rovers could serve as a means of selecting which
places are interesting enough to one day warrant a human landing. If a
rover were to find a cliff face with exposed fossils,


I'm going way out on a limb here, but I'm a amateur paleontologist...and
this looks odd: http://www.activemax.com/archives/mars-fossil.jpg
It could just be a pseudofossil (a natural rock formation that
resembles a fossil), but if I'd found that near Jamestown, North Dakota,
it would be going into the collection bag for later identification as to
what type of creature it was.
It looks a lot like the shell of a primitive cephalopod mollusk that
adds a segment for each year of growth.
On Earth, that would be a month of growth, but Phobos and Deimos don't
have enough of a gravity field to get a tidal effect going in a
hypothetical ancient Martian sea.
(Or it could be something like the segmented stem of a crinoid.)
Although it would be fun to see the interactions of two moons of
different orbital periods and a sun on a planet's marine lifeforms due
to the odd tides.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:



Hop David wrote:


Recently I was replacing a screw on my eyeglass hinge. At one point I
dropped the screw. Hearing it hit the floor, I quickly turned my eyes
toward the direction of the sound to see it bounce and roll in a
corner. It was easy to retrieve it.

This would not have been possible had I been using teleoperated hands
with a 2.5 second delay.

Actually being there is a distinct advantage that telepresence,
especially distant telepresence, cannot fully replicate.


So let me get this straight... if you dropped a 2 mm long screw on the
lunar surface you are just going to reach down there with your pressure
suite glove and pick it up?

Uh, no. Several times I've mentioned the best place for humans to do
maintenance work is in a pressurized bay.

Learn how to read, dammit.

You might want to try a magnet first,
(mayhaps mounted on a "Luumba") or get one of those $1.00 eyeglass
repair kits at WalMart. Better yet, you may want to not to build probes
that use 2mm long screws on them without Loktite, or wear your helmet
the next time you take a walk on the lunar surface.

Derksen was opining that fast reflexes aren't really needed. Quickly
turning to the sound from an impact of a wayward tool is just one of
many uses of fast reflexes.

Your paragraph above does not discuss in any way the advantages or
disadvantages of a 2.5 second telepresence lag.

If you have tiny screws that can fall out and seriously damage
equipment, then somebody at the design end has been screwing up badly.

I wasn't talking about screws seriously damaging equipment. Yet another
tangent that has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand
(immediate presence vs 2.5 second delayed telepresence). Again, please
learn to read for comprehension.



But if you're going to be designing these extraterrestrial mining
machines with these capabilities either way, why _not_ make them
autonomous?


Well, I consider such robust A.I. rather implausible science fiction.
I could read a yarn employing this device with WSOD, but I don't
expect it to come to pass.


I'm still keen to hear the technical details of those
super-economical/super efficient rockets of yours that are gong to drop
spaceflight cost be a order of magnitude or so.

And where have I been talking about super economical rockets?


Miners need common sense and ingenuity to deal with the many
manifestations of Murphy's law that constantly crop up. I don't see
teleoperated robots or autonomous robots by themselves as being
adequate to be competent miners.


How many miners down in the shafts in Tennessee have a doctor's degree
in coal mining?

I don't know about coal mining but I have some acquaintance with copper
mines. There are extremely competent mining engineers with doctoral
degrees that spend a great deal of time in various locations throughout
the mine.

Further, there are some very demanding apprenticeship programs for the
journeyman trades. I've known boiler makers whose knowledge of geometry,
trigonometry and metallurgy rival an engineers'.

Do you honestly believe miners are a bunch of clumsy morons? You
arrogant, ignorant, little prick.



Here's a page describing how NASA's working on an artificial nose for
use in detecting chemical leaks on board the ISS because the human nose
isn't good enough:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/06oct_enose.htm

If we really need to detect and analyze vapors, machines are already
quite good at that. They're not yet as versatile as human noses, but who
needs versatility? They're there to do a specific job.


Even given many hours using telesenses, a user won't acquire the ease
of use of our native senses. And, again, an onsite worker would have
access to his native senses as well as machine enhanced senses.


So the astronaut-miner is going to go sniffing around in a _vacuum_?

Uh, no. Several times I've mentioned the best place for humans to do
maintenance work is in a pressurized bay.

Learn how to read, dammit.



But robots only are insufficient to do the mining and manufacturing
operations proposed in "The High Frontier", in my opinion.


Hop, it's a book...it's not the Holy Bible.

Nor did I say it was the Holy Bible.

Hop

Bryan Derksen wrote:


Note that Robby isn't walking around on Mars at the moment, but a pair of
robots have been exploring things up there for 45 months now,

It could be that running an entire industry is more complicated than
a limited-scope scientific investigation.


What exactly are the industrial goals?

If the title of this thread's an indication, I'd say making solar power
satellites from mostly lunar materials. Gerard K. O'Neill talked about
other stuff in his book "The High Frontier" but that was his main
proposal for achieving ROI from space development.

Hop

Monte Davis wrote:
It helps *enormously.* All the "we're gonna have clever robots for
space operations" put together can't support a fraction of the
manpower, expertise and budget that goes into terrestrial automation
work every day.


I think we're seeing the dawning of the robotic age, and once it gets
rolling it's going to be like the always promised but only recently
realized era of the flat-screen TVs. Tried to purchase a new CRT
computer monitor lately?
once it hits the break-through point where the technology isn't a
novelty, but actually shows real advantages, then all across the world
tremendous amounts of money and effort are thrown at it as competing
firms to ride the crest of the new wave for the sake of profits.
We may not have the Jetson's Rosie yet, but there are a lot of Roomba's
zipping around under sofas as I write this, and they should be looked at
like those first privative PCs.
Maybe Rosie should be looked at more closely; she got around on wheels
rather than walking on legs: http://www.robotnut.com/ken/k48.jpg
...which greatly simplified the whole concept of staying upright as
well as saving a lot of energy.
(mind you, I don't remember the Jetson residence having multiple floors
connected by stairs, which could have been a problem.The elevators using
antigravity were a neat touch of technology though.)
Note that our cars don't walk around on legs either, nor climb up stairs
when approaching a overpass. In fact, horses didn't react at all well to
stairs either outside of the Royal Lipizzaner Stallions and that one
that Queen Elizabeth I rode up the stairs inside the battlement tower
when she was telling King Philip of Spain to get himself a new less
submersible armada...and shove it up his Roman Catholic arse.
Outside of not realizing that the three laws of robotics were going to
be a hilarious joke among the guys who first figured out that the best
use of robots was shooting at people while being completely out of range
of their fire while snarfing down Pringles, Asimov's biggest mistake was
thinking that robots were going to be anthropomorphic.
It's funny how long that idea stuck around, and it would be interesting
to figure out when the first realization of that concept not being
necessary came into literature and films.
I think a hundred years from now this planet's going to probably be
crawling in robots of one sort or another, ranging from around a
millimeter in size to monsters of over a hundred meters long, a whole
robotic ecosystem nearly as complex and interconnected as the living one.
Where we fit in that future I don't know...maybe nowhere.
Who wants something as imperfect as a human lover when you could have
one that is always as sexually exciting, understanding, and perfectly
attuned to your desires and emotional needs as if it was made just
specifically for you...which of course...it will be.
Fantasize about seducing a Playboy Playmate? How about your seven
favorites in one week? And each being exactly the way you imagined her
to be when you first saw her centerfold - voice, personality,
expressions, perfume, humor, romance...and lust?
For you she's the sweetest girl you ever met; she's also simultaneously
with someone just down the street, and for him, she's dressed in leather
and carrying a whip.
What living woman could possible compete with the self-absorbed perfect
fantasy of that game?
If you want kids...of course, the factory could certainly whip up a
couple of those for you also.
How about Beaver Cleaver and Shirley Temple?
....at least for today.
Tomorrow, Dexter and Didi.
The joys of the future. ;-)


Pat

Mike Combs wrote:
"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

I think it's quite important,


The issues are important, but our debate is not, because major
decision-makers aren't paying any attention to our silly little debate.


Well, you probably hit that dead on the nose.
But the lurkers support me, I'll have you know that.
I can sense their thoughts, and they are 100% behind me.
Just like that dog I was talking to yesterday...what was his name?
Sam, that's it.
He said bad things about you, BTW. :-D

if the reason for sending people into space is to have them do mining, and
the mining can be done at lower cost roboticly, then you've just lost a
major rationalization for sending people into space.


Yes, but that second point is a big "if". Those of us who see a role for
humans in space are certain that present robotics is not up to the task, and
are confident that the situation will improve but not entirely reverse in
the next 25 years.


Sam said that anyone trying to figure out what the world was going to
be in 175 years (that's 25 in "human years") is full of crap and
deserves to get swatted in the ass with a rolled up copy of a old Omni
magazine and get his nose rubbed in his own urine stain.
He also said that Golden Retriever on the next block to your south
remembers what you did to it last year, and it would be really
unfortunate if something chased you out in front of a oncoming car someday.
Say like next Tuesday at around 3:14 in the afternoon.



That's one of the few things that could drop the cost of lunar mining of
the materials to the point where it might be cost competitive versus
surface launch of pre-fab components.


The experts
Define "experts".
I have generally found that experts have a greater tendency to be wrong
than the average person's common sense in direct proportion to their
faith in their own expertise being infallible. (cases in point, Fred
Hoyle's** Archaeopteryx "fraud" and Carl Sagan's nuclear winter from
the Kuwaiti oil fires).
You know, if you were to bring that Golden Retriever a nice cut of steak
in the next couple of days, much unnecessary bloodshed could be spared
come next Tuesday afternoon...but forget trying it on Monday...dogs can
sense the perspiration of desperation a mile off, and they rightfully
despise it.
Just to be on the safe side, I'd say a 1/2 pound sirloin tip steak and
a giant rawhide chew-bone would definitely put you in the clear. It
would certainly be cheaper than that $1,000 dollar deductible on your
health insurance.
But don't listen to me, you may have no need for your right leg below
the knee, and find being dragged a quarter block down the street while
pinned under a UPS truck invigorating.
I've also heard skin grafts are nowhere near as painful as you've heard.
;-)

Pat

Mike Combs wrote:
"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

She may look polite there, but watch it - she'll snap your spine in a
second if you get fresh.


As far as I've ever been able to tell, she can't even so much as get up off
that stool.


Actually she can... she can stand up with her feet being locked down
through the slot in the floor, like Disney's Abe Lincoln.
Problem here is she looks a lot more real than ol' Abe ever did with her
facial expressions and arm movements, even at very close range.
This criitter is spooky, it's got that feel of Rotwang's robot out of
Fritz Lang's "Metropolis"; it looks human, but there is something
terribly cold, lifeless, and soulless about it.
Robots should look like robots, they shouldn't look like this.

Pat