The End Of Astronauts

Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration

Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees, 2022, Bvt Lib 629.4

• Donald Goldsmith (1943), author of astronomy books

• Martin Rees (1942), UK Astronomer Royal, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

Two 80ish astronomer-observers. Out of 574 astronauts (as of 2022 Oct), only two of those have been astronomer-observers: John Mace Grunsfeld and Karl Gordon Heinize.

This book claims that astronauts are not necessary for the scientific exploration of the solar system. Perhaps this is true if astronauts are programmed as robots, and are not expected to make creative contributions in situations that require iterative hand-eye feedback, or must not be interrupted by solar conjunctions. So the real question is, are astronauts contributors and thinkers, or are they ornery robots?

• p8 astrophysicist David Spergel, "our history as humans has shown that first we screw things up, and then we make some things right"

  • our history has shown that humans mostly do things that provide some benefit. Astronomy is paid for by philanthropy, but mostly as a development platform for military surveillance technologies.

• p18 "No Buck Rogers, no bucks" - reference to 1984 congressional testimony.

• p20 public opinion polls: authors choose 2019 C-SPAN poll to gauge public interest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-SPAN#Audience. Not exactly representative.

  • In 2018, Pew Research poll: 80% of Americans say the space station is a good investment

• p88 ref. 5.17 Ben Lindberg, Please Sterilize Your Spacecraft

• p95 "The odds of a catastrophic impact will occur during the next few millenia are very low"

  • But not zero. What is the "cost" of an earth-sterilizing impact? Multiply that gigantically large number by "very low" and the cost is still immense. A cost we cannot pay in time, if the threat emerges rapidly. The authors refer to the 1-in-2700 risk of a Bennu impact, because we do not know enough to calculate "zero" with reasonable certainty. And that is for an object we know about; what about the objects that we haven't seen yet, because they are too far away?

• p102 worries about escape of dust and debris from asteroid mining.
• p103 "Do we have the right to do whatever we choose with the products of 4.6 billion years of cosmic evolution?"

  • do we have the right to confabulate hyperbolic questions when making time- and reality-constrained questions?