[ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 7:42 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> Even those of us who are hardcore space enthusiasts realize that space
> flight needs to be geared toward returning rewards that are real to others
> besides astronomy fans.


And once there is a place among that where humans outperform robots, then
humans will have a place in space.  My hunch is that this will be in
maintenance and repair: when the teleoperation systems break down, such
that even sending a repair robot isn't viable.  This requires complex
enough machinery to be in place first, though, and right now it isn't.
There's a long way to go before humans and robots, rather than just robots,
will be economically justified.

An analogy may be made to the orks of the Warhammer 40K universe, for those
familiar with that.  First come the plants, then the small animals.  Only
once an ecosystem is built up do the orks arise.  By analogy, we don't even
have the plants in place yet.
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