Louis Friedman, executive director emeritus of The Planetary Society, has a new book out and gives Discover Magazine‘s The Crux blog an interview in support of it, where he suggests Mars is the outer limit for the next 10,000 years:
[Discover]: Even so, do you think that will be enough for everybody? Wouldn’t some daredevil take a human mission to points beyond at some point, just to show that they could do it? Is it so unrealistic to think that China, India, Brazil, Russia, the United States, the United Nations, or for that matter a government that has yet to exist on Mars, could find itself in a new space race where the goal is to get people — live people — where no one has gone before, for that prestige factor?
Wanting to do these things just seems to be part of human nature, we always produce people who want to visit new places, even if there’s no logical reason, don’t you agree? Do you think artificial intelligence and other technologies will change something about us, so that nobody will ever take a distant, dangerous space voyage that has no practical value?
[Friedman]: You have raised several questions here. You are right about the possibility that if we can do something, someone might just want to. We have all kinds of extreme sports here on Earth. I don’t rule out some daredevils or tourist extremists from our Earth-Mars home trying a daring mission to the asteroid belt or Ganymede. But it won’t be very relevant or even as much a part of our Society as those extreme trips to Mt. Everest.
Somebody jumped out of a balloon from the edge of space a year or so again, interesting, but not relevant to human development. Humans will already feel present on Ganymede (and lots of other places) and the development of human life support to engage in those extreme efforts will be expensive and pointless – if even possible…I think NASA has it right now. Their Journey to Mars puts into context why we have human spaceflight. In my opinion, there is no other purpose to human spaceflight.
In his answer he’s referencing a previous answer where he suggests advanced telepresence will replace actual human presence beyond Mars. What caught my attention was his suggestion there’s only a single purpose to spaceflight. Surely this contradicts all of human history in which a multitude of purposes coincide into single – if composite – actions. He’s not suggesting there’s a physical barrier that cannot be overcome, but almost a bureaucratic decision not to go.
My suspicion is that commercial interests will find use for telepresence and limited artificial intelligence1 in such exploration, but there will be various limits imposed by simple physical requirements2, and that eventually those folks not interested in adapting to (or terraforming) Mars will make a go of it – for their reasons.
Not for Louis’.
