&gt; Its high time that humanity moved past the notion that sending meatbags into space is a good idea.<p>No machine can come back and tell you how it felt to be there. How the Apollo 8 crew reacted the first time they looked back and saw the distant Earth as a planet, no different than the Moon ahead of them. Or how was it to be completely cut off from all of mankind while behind the Moon. Or to take that now famous earthrise picture.<p>There are two things here. The first, is the quest for knowledge. About how things are and how things became. Robots can do that wonderfully well.<p>The other is the quest for our place in the vastness of space. One is the quest for knowledge, for information. The second is the quest for meaning. No machine will give us that.