| HN Mirror

> What benefits are there to sending humans to Mars? What do we hope to accomplish that couldn't be done better by a barrage of super advanced robots?

Well robots work very well, and if research is your only goal then those might be the best forever. But even those run into issues and can be very complex and expensive, see Mars Sample Return. When you scale systems up, it is possible that at some level redundancies and pre-planning for every contingency will get too expensive. So much that sending monkeys with duct tapes that can handle and fix all kinds of issues might be actually less expensive. Will we get to such scale with research only? Probably not.

But there are other goals, like space industry, and related mining, which require much bigger scale. And unless we want to declare all planets out there as a natural reserve with absolutely no Earth contamination possible (yea there's a treaty, we will see how long it survives), people will want go there.

And good luck trying to stop China from establishing Mars research base. Sure it might take them 40+ years, but I wouldn't bet on them not getting there. Or them adhering to any kinds of international treaty.

> It is estimated to cost $1-1.5 trillion to send 9 people on Mars, and upwards of $2 trillion for a minimally staffed base on an uninhabitable planet.

Random numbers pulled out of nowhere. Don't listen to such garbage. Even talking about "minimally staffed base" and it's costs is kinda silly when the main (and so far only) proposed system (Starship) for achieving that is still in its infancy. It might not hit its projected costs. It also might achieve them and then such cost estimates about Mars base will look as silly as IBM estimates of how many computers the world needs.

> My main point is, wouldn't it be better to focus that amount of money and effort on developing technologies that allow humans to live on Earth sustainably? Where is the cult-like public support for spending unlimited amounts of money on preventing mass extinction on Earth, the only habitable planet in our solar system?

You know that there are proposals like space based solar power, space mirrors in Sun-Earth L1, space industry utilizing resources from asteroids . . . Sure they are still mostly in the sci-fi stage. But some of them might turn into reality, and then many of our issues on earth will be solved merely as a side-effect. It's too early to talk about "better" spending, when related technologies are still not even close to being mature and stable. F9 landed not even 9 years ago!

> Maybe after we accomplish that we could think about making Mars a sustainable and habitable planet too?

Honestly that's just bad logic, don't you really see obvious arguments against? It's fine as an opinion, but trying to convince other people without strong arguments does not seem like it will have much chance.

EDIT: if you truly care about not wasting money on stupid stuff, argue for cancelling SLS. THAT is one big waste of money, regardless of whether Starship succeeds or not.