Comment by indoordin0saur 2 months ago
Put a handful of geologists on a Mars base with an ATV, some hammers and chisels and I'm sure they could accomplish the greatest feats of discovery in their field perhaps ever.
Note, I'm not saying that this would be easy or safe or cheap. But I am suggesting that the science achieved by getting some real scientists on Mars would be qualitatively and quantitatively greater than robotic missions.
SpaceX is currently drastically reducing the price per currency unit as is, and their current prototype is intended to smash a few more price barriers; to the point where the number of probes might hit diminishing returns, and actual human scientists become affordable. We'll have to see! At any rate it seems to be becoming commercially viable, even if SpaceX aren't the ones to do it (they do have competition chasing their tails).
AFAICT, science with actual human scientists requires every piece of equipment and then some that would be on a probe.
So the cost with actual human scientists is never going to be below a probe and will realistically be significantly higher.
That means that the actual human scientists need to bring significant value to the endeavour for it to make sense.
Given that resources are always going to be limited, absolute improvements matter less than value-per-currency-unit. And the value of putting people there at this stage of the game seems quite likely to be fairly limited.