To the Editor:
Tom Wolfe says that now is the time to send humans to Mars and beyond, and rejects sending robots in our place because they have such a tiny fraction of our brainpower.
Heâ??s got it the wrong way around. The dangers of space travel will make it prohibitively expensive until we can build spacecraft with brains as good as ours. We will have artificial brains superior to ours sometime during this century, and their incredible productivity and skills will make space travel affordable.
Ambitious human space travel should wait for smart robots.
Bill Hibbard
Stoughton, Wis., July 19, 2009
The writer is an emeritus senior scientist at the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin.