Our Place in Space
milhayser | August 15, 2011
NASA's last shuttle mission has flown, and with no administrative fervor to put a human on Mars, what is humanity's place in space? On Life at the SETI Institute, Dr. Cynthia Phillips says that for scientific exploration of our solar system, "robots don't need food or water, they can withstand much more damaging radiation, and, perhaps most importantly, they don't need to come home at the end of the mission." Plus, "for the cost of putting two astronauts on the surface of a planet like Mars for a few days or weeks, you could afford an army of robots that could comb the surface of the…