The value of manned space flight?

[The Firebird]

Yes. Mind you, that's total cost spread over more than a decade.

Amazon intends to spend that much on AI infrastrucure in a single year.

But, by all means, be down on Artemis for its spending.

Please let's not do an AI thread

So more science funding is a good thing, from my perspective. I think the 0.35% of the federal budget is too small.

The reason I brought up cost was to discuss the tradeoff between robotics and manned missions, which I think is relevant to the future of space travel. For example, recent missions include Dragonfly (flying robot to Titan, $1 billion) and Europa Clipper (flyby of a moon of Jupiter, $5 billion). The recently canceled Mars Sample Return mission was on the order of $10 billion, and deemed too expensive.

You can run over a dozen robotics missions for the cost of Artemis. There are a lot of ideas out there, with good proposals that took years to develop, but lacked funding.

Ideally, we would do both.

There's still an implicit personal opinion in there on how money "should" be spent that I don't accept as factually true.

It's a positive claim, not a normative one.

 

[Clint_L]

And some of us are pushing back against the futurist dream of colonizing space as a way to save humanity.

This is my main point. Well, that and that most crewed space exploration is super inefficient and mostly for vanity. But yeah, go space exploration! With robots!

Colonization is a pipe dream.

 

[Morrus]

Colonization is a pipe dream.

It’ll be like Antarctica. Or the ISS. There will be a permanent presence —a research station—on the moon, maybe Mars, but nobody is going to be rushing to move there.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I'm not going to respond to these in detail, but these views are not in line with the current scientific consensus. To get a runaway greenhouse on Earth, you'd need an increase in solar radiation. It may be possible in a few hundred million years, but for now an increase in CO2 is not likely to cause it.

I wasn't thinking of CO2 runaway effects.
I am thinking about limited effects that still might exceed our ability to adapt to the resulting changes to the environment. Runaway effects are an extreme version of that.

 

[The Firebird]

I wasn't thinking of CO2 runaway effects.
I am thinking about limited effects that still might exceed our ability to adapt to the resulting changes to the environment. Runaway effects are an extreme version of that.

I confess I'm confused, because I don't see how you get from those limited effects to boiling the oceans.

 

[dragoner]

Another great dying could take us.

 

[Umbran]

Please let's not do an AI thread

Sure. The point is that, on the scale of "poor" spending, maybe Artemis really isn't the poster child, or even low-hanging fruit.

The reason I brought up cost was to discuss the tradeoff between robotics and manned missions, which I think is relevant to the future of space travel. For example, recent missions include Dragonfly (flying robot to Titan, $1 billion) and Europa Clipper (flyby of a moon of Jupiter, $5 billion). The recently canceled Mars Sample Return mission was on the order of $10 billion, and deemed too expensive.

You can run over a dozen robotics missions for the cost of Artemis. There are a lot of ideas out there, with good proposals that took years to develop, but lacked funding.

Ideally, we would do both.

So, again, the trick is to note that manned missions and unmanned are not actually in competition with each other. NASA's internal process for choosing missions is complicated and a bit obtuse to outsiders like us - most of the unmanned missions come about through a complicated internal peer-review process.

Artemis, by contrast, is a direct result of specific Presidential policy directives - basically, they were ordered to do something along these lines. The relevant memorandum (2017's Space Policy Directive-1) reads, in part:

"[USA/NASA will]... Lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the Solar System and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities. Beginning with missions beyond low-Earth orbit, the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.”

So, we should be clear that Artemis is not the result of normal science-mission choices. We can't really call it a poor choice of science funding, when it isn't really a scientific mission.

Ultimately, the critique of using crewed missions, in this case, can be directed to the Oval Office.

 

[Umbran]

I confess I'm confused, because I don't see how you get from those effects to boiling the oceans.

If all of human energy use is instead pumped directly into the oceans, and none is lost to space, you get to boiling the oceans after about 10,000 years, IIRC.