In almost all the space social media groups, when you start talking about how to do certain things on Mars or the Moon, someone says that the robots will do it. While telepresence remotes and robots will be in use to a degree greater than seen on Earth, they are going to be in short supply for at least the next century. There is so many things that need doing that there will not be enough robots to do them all.
There will be over a hundred different jobs that need doing for each and every robot sent up. Most have to have at least some degree of specialization to function efficiently, one design for laying bricks outside might be able to wash the dog but I wouldn’t count on it. Furthermore, for each robot working on one task is going to mean some other task is not getting done. People will need to decide which type of robots to invest in and which jobs they will have them doing. This will leave thousands of things undone that need doing.
This means that people will be doing them or they won’t get done. Many won’t get done, and most jobs will pay poorly compared to the cost of living there. Without the thousands-of-years-old massive infrastructure of Earth, productivity is going to be poor. It is going to cost nearly as much to make a bar of soap there as to ship one from Earth. Making them with the massive infrastructure, both mechanical and biological takes a lot of time and effort. A simple bar of soap could cost you between one and ten hours of labor. There are thousands of products that are the same way. You won’t have robots taking care of all this. Most people investing in robots will be doing it where the payoff is more guaranteed, construction.
Not only will the robots not do everything but the eighty-hour workweek will be more common than the forty-hour workweek. There is no avoiding that the cost of living is going to be extreme. Even if some of the more optimistic forecasts by people such as Elon Musk come true, the cost of living there is still going to be far higher than anywhere on Earth for a century. This means doing without a lot of things and working long hours to get others. Just because robots will be more common there than on Earth doesn’t mean people there can kick back and relax. Most of those are going to be colony builders and the ones keeping everyone alive. The idea that it will be a handful of people being catered to by an army of robots is as far from the truth as it gets.
Eptle 