Do you agree or disagree with Isaac Asimov..

Isaac Asimov?

Please do come up to date. This author wrote most of his books in the nineteen fifties or earlier. We had very little of the technology that we have today back then. He wrote way before the scientific discoveries of the last few decades.

Back then manned space flight was the ONLY spaceflight. Hence if we wanted to explore space we had to go in person. Hence Mr Asimov was writing under a severe handicap.

Fast forward to today. We can easily accomplish any form of space exploration robotically. The computers and robotics of today are far ahead of anything we had in the fifties. Hence Mr Asimov's assertion is no longer valid. We can explore space and simultaneously have no risk to astronauts, becasue there does not have to be any astronauts involved.


Cheers!

...and if you don't want to consult a science fiction writer, why not try out Neil DeGrasse-Tyson? He's as contemporary as they come, and he is a hard scientist (as was Dr. Asimov, who wrote most of his books from 1950 to 1992, btw). Here he is just 5 months ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPTvdZBZQ…

The benefits outweigh the risks by far. The same was said when people first ventured out to sea, believing the ships would fall off the edge (of the horizon). Humans must explore and space in the next exploration.

It would depend on the mission itself. The psychological impact of putting man in space was enormous during the Cold War. Nowadays, many missions are performed more efficiently as unmanned flights.

Of course it does how many people die doing their very ordinary boring terrestrial jobs