symon@lhotse.cs.unc.edu (James Symon) (07/13/88)
In article <1219@thumper.bellcore.com>, karn@thumper.bellcore.com (Phil R. Karn) writes: > > Your arguments represent a convincing case for versatile remote control, > not for manned spaceflight. The reason for putting humans in space now is to do research on humans in space. Forget any other arguments. This one settles it once and for all. Part of that research involves letting them do things that might better be handled by remote control. Why do research on humans in space? Humans WILL spread out from the earth. If you don't believe this then you are right, the issue of telepresence vs. human bodies is debatable. If, however, you grant that we will not ALL stay forever on the face of the earth, your only reasonable argument is to say that the current human guinea- pigs-in-space should not be allowed to mess with things they might damage. But then we will need to provide them with dummy jobs to do as part of the research because when we do spread out from earth we will be doing some jobs ourselves rather than having everything done for us from back home. Of course, as humans, the current research animals will know that the tasks are dummies so the research results will be questionable. Therefore we need to let them do at least SOME important stuff regardless of whether good remote control might do it better. In the case of other planets, telepresence does not provide real time control. Then your only argument is that you can build semi-independent robots that will perform better than humans. Not yet I bet. No, this is not circular. I mean that we will spread out from the earth for reasons other than doing research on humans in space or taking care of jobs that might better be handled by remote control. Jim Symon Rt 4 Box 443 Chapel Hill, NC 27516 at school: Jim Symon Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175 "Better get Helms on the UUCP: uunet!mcnc!unc!symon scrambler, we got incoming UUCP: decvax!mcnc!unc!symon treaties all over the screen" Internet:symon@cs.unc.edu - MacNelly ***Don't use "r" or my header line address***