That Irreplaceable Human Brain

Man is still the best computer that we can put aboard a spacecraft -- and the only one that can be mass-produced with unskilled labor.
-- Wernher Von Braun

It always amazes me when people say that robots will replace humans, that robotic missions are as good or better as human missions in the world of spaceflight.

Not that I want to knock robotic missions. Nor say that humans are better suited for everything. When it comes to monitoring information or repetitive tasks or going in first into a hazardous environment, I am all for robotics.

But nothing quite replaces people. What triggered this line of thinking? I read this article at the NYT yesterday. It was about "hunches" and how they were a bigger factor in the soldiers' success at avoiding danger than our sophisticated gadgets and equipment.

Now, I have no trouble with the concept of intuition but I know many of the science-minded see such things as simply a subconscious perception of minutia, an internal ability to take in diverse data and, without conscious thought, reach an accurate conclusion.

People have a tendency to get excited about automated responses to disaster. And for good reason. But it's a mistake, in my opinion, to think one has to decide which is better. Each have their uses. It shouldn't be an either/or situation. An autonomous response is great for those situations where you can predict cause and effect.

But no one can predict everything. Robots and autonomous equipment are limited by what the developer could imagine, what the developer judged would be the right reaction in an unknown situation.

But it's not the same as having people in the situations, up close and personal. On Apollo 17, the crew had already been ordered back, but they stopped and took some samples of rocks unlike any they'd seen and found actual orange soil. On Apollo 11, if the lander had been programmed to land autonomously with no alternatives, they would have fallen over because the landing site had big boulders. In both cases, human judgment provided for success.

To be frank, I don't think we'll really have explored anywhere until someone with a human mind has walked it, his (or her) breath quickening, using his or her mind to do what no robot, no matter how clever can do: react to what was never expected, what was never foreseen, figuring out problems no one predicted.

We're not quite obsolete just yet. It's expensive to carry something so precious into space. They need life support, protection from vacuum, radiation, thermal extremes. And, of course, we got to return 'em.

And it's still worth it.

(P.S. here's a solar eclipse using the earth from Apollo 17. How cool is that?)