NASA has an “Artemis mission” planned. The goal is to establish a permanent moon base. But I don’t see what we can do there that we can’t do with robots. We’d have to provide space for people to live, and food, and water, and all that stuff. Not even mentioning 1/6 gravity isn’t exactly healthy.
I’d rather we just send robots to the moon and do what we need to do there until we can easily build huge habitats for people.
One of our long term goals, as a species, should be to become multi planetary. This fits with our instincts, that spread us all around the planet. To this end, the moon is an excellent test bed. It is far enough away to justify being as self sustaining as possible. But close enough that evacuation back to earth or emergency resupply from earth is reasonable.
There are also financial goals. The moon has easy access to resources that are very useful. Some to earth directly (e.g. helium 3 for fusion reactors) some for space.(E.g. water and low gravity for rocket fuel production). It’s basically a launch pad to deeper space.
As for why humans. Simply put, robots aren’t yet up to the task of heavy construction. We will need people locally, if only for low lag control. At that point, the extra support structures scale up quite efficiently.
The human element might change with time. But it’s a chicken and the egg type problem. Until we have the tech, we will need humans in the loop. However, we likely won’t develop the tech without extended experience working on another body.
As for Artemis, it’s a first step mission. It’s not even the foundation of what we will want to build long term. It’s the breaking ground so the foundations can be planned out. It’s pure science and trailblazing. It will be decades before we see the true return on the investment. But without the investment, that will just be put off more and more.
You’re technically correct, but I think there’s a philosophical question that gets left out of the discussion:
Is humanity worth saving?
Having met a fair number of humans, the answer is not an obvious and enthusiastic “yes”.
Humanity has a lot of flaws, however, in my opinion, it’s still a lot better than nothing. We can work on improving what we have.
Humans as they are now might not, but what about future generations? What about evolutionary descendants?
I agree. Humans are an invasive species
Agreed, though we can also (potentially) act as an interplanetary “pioneer” species.
To be invasive implies an existing population to invade. The other planets don’t have life, best we can tell.
Plant life :p But it would be nice if, by the time we do reach interplanetary travel, we do not have to live off the land we visit.
We would live of the land, but it would be the land itself, not the life growing from it.