Years it was said that we were going to end up with the Big Crunch. Then in the past decade or two, it was said that we’d end up with a heat death. Now it seems like we’re heading away from that direction.
Naturally, if you were immersed in the actual research, I’m sure the question would have seemed a lot more unsolved than it was presented. But it wasn’t just presented this way by pop science books; even scientists, when talking to laymen, tend to oversimplify things to a degree that they can become misleading. We’ve seen this discussed when it comes to things like string theory and quantum mechanics. Too many times people are saying “this is what happens” when they should be saying “we have no idea, there are a bunch of different theories, but we fundamentally don’t know.”
Whatever happens to the universe, it won’t happen for billions of years. What people think will happen today might not be what they think will happen in ten, a hundred, or a thousand years from now. The research is interesting, but I have to assume that any answer we have now could be completely wrong.
For all of the things we want to do, automation outperforms humans in space. I pointed this out in my earlier post - this wasn’t the case in the 50’s and early 60’s, so these satellites were planned to be manned (and actually were in the USSR’s case). But automation made much more sense, so the plans changed to unmanned satellites.
Perhaps this could change in the future. But at least in the present, unmanned makes more sense, which is why these things are unmanned. And historically, increased automation has lessened the need for something to be manned (which, is to be expected), so it’s likely the same will be true when it comes to space.
That’s an argument argument that human spaceflight could, at some point in the future, make sense. Though it’s also likely that automation becomes cheaper in the future. When people are claiming that automation is going to replace many tasks for humans on earth, it’s not much of a stretch to think they would continue to perform better than humans in space, where humans are at a severe disadvantage.
We also have to consider what it is that we actually want people to do up there. A lot of people say “A human could do more science on Mars than a rover!” Leaving aside the fact that we could send multiple rovers for the cost and effort of sending a human, and those rovers would be on the planet much longer - “do science” isn’t a goal. Even the current rover missions have questionable usefulness, which is why there’s always a big celebration when they land, or a discussion about how impressive the engineering is, but extremely little discussion about any of the things they’re learning.
The weird thing about NASA's budget when you look at it[1] is that funding allocation appears to be inversely proportional to the benefit. Human spaceflight is the largest chunk, at 44.9% of the budget. Aeronautics and technology are at the bottom, with technology being allocated 4.9% of the budget, and aeronautics 3.5%.
There were good reasons why people were interested in sending people into space in the early days of space exploration. Before automated systems were sufficiently developed, manned programs looked like the best choice. But once automated systems became sufficiently advanced, it was clear that they were the way to go.
You can see this when it comes to reconnaissance satellites - both the U.S. (with the uncompleted Manned Orbital Laboratory) and the USSR (with Almaz, which was completed) began with the idea of having manned reconnaissance satellites, but as time progressed they realized autonomous ones were better.
If we were sticking people in reconnaissance satellites just for the sake of sticking them in reconnaissance satellites today, it would obviously be farcical. But NASA’s manned space program has being doing the equivalent for decades - blowing a huge part of their budget on sending people into space just for the sake of sending them into space (by the 80’s this had reached the point where they had a program of sending teachers into space for the purpose of having them come back and tell students how cool it was to go to space). But since NASA has more open ended objectives than the military, it’s easier to hide the fact that this isn’t accomplishing much, or that these programs have diverted so much from many of NASA’s core objectives.
Naturally, if you were immersed in the actual research, I’m sure the question would have seemed a lot more unsolved than it was presented. But it wasn’t just presented this way by pop science books; even scientists, when talking to laymen, tend to oversimplify things to a degree that they can become misleading. We’ve seen this discussed when it comes to things like string theory and quantum mechanics. Too many times people are saying “this is what happens” when they should be saying “we have no idea, there are a bunch of different theories, but we fundamentally don’t know.”
Whatever happens to the universe, it won’t happen for billions of years. What people think will happen today might not be what they think will happen in ten, a hundred, or a thousand years from now. The research is interesting, but I have to assume that any answer we have now could be completely wrong.