An excellent essay is “Here’s What We’ll Do In Space By 2116,” Emily Lakdawalla’s Nautilus piece that conjures up next-level space exploration in a way that manages to pass a sobriety test. While acknowledging the great obstacles to come, the writer takes a bold yet realistic look at what could well occur in the following ten decades, explaining, among other things, why early voyagers to Mars will likely be transported by private companies–and why the very first ones might not exactly be human. Lakdawalla acknowledges the next century will largely see us exploring (relatively) close to home, perhaps using asteroid mining and such to jump-start an “in-space economy.”

A passage dear to me is one that focuses on using non-human passengers to initially traverse the final frontier, the path I believe we should be taking for the foreseeable future. An excerpt:

Because of the costs and risks of physical human spaceflight, I’m personally more excited about a different kind of space exploration. Advances in miniaturization have made it relatively cheap to launch lots of microsatellites to near-Earth space. These craft will soon be sent further out, and it won’t be long before there are lots of little spacecraft landing on the Moon. From our homes on Earth, we could all take virtual joyrides across the lunar surface, with these mini explorers acting as our distant eyes.

It’s possible that this is how humans will first explore Mars, too—with a robotic body that needs no food, water, shelter, or sleep, serving as the avatar of human operators. The humans working the robot will still need to be located near Mars, not Earth, because of the significant delay in radio communications between the two planets. (The lag between commands sent and data received would range from eight to 42 minutes.) But the humans need not undertake the risks and challenges of landing on Mars: People in orbit at Mars could directly and immediately control Mars robots, all while staying in a ship or station tricked out with everything our delicate bodies need to survive. 

Then again, depending on how technology advances, it may be that the division that we now draw between “human” and “robotic” exploration will be archaic in 50 years.•