[Cyrien]

Actually the belief that robots are just as good or better than people has been shown to be flawed in several real life applications.

In the establishment of fake Mars bases on islands around the Arctic regions when using robot probes to explore many intersting things were missed. Whole colonies of algae on the sides of rocks above the level of the robot view. Cracks on the surface of the landscape that showed large scale water erosion were missed due to the lack of scale of the small robots.

When people dressed in mock space suits went out they saw and exlpored all these things that they missed when using the robots. And of course when they were controlling the robots there was no long time delay between response and commands.
To be fair you can do things with robots that you can't do with people, but the oppossite is also true and needs to be recognized. Robots are only programmed and people can think and they have totally different scales when used observationally.

Robots are a tool and we should fully use them but we should never expect them to fully be able to replace humans. They are cost effective and can give us a nice and relatively detailed preliminary report. But they can't replace humans and do all the things humans would do, just as humans can't do all the things robots can do.

Thus there are in fact scientific rationals for going with people. Just look at what the people who went to the moon found that no one had previously suspected. The hovering of the dust, the thickness of the regolith, etc.

[ December 13, 2003, 21:30: Message edited by: Cyrien ]