BOOKS

The End Of Astronauts

Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Harvard University Press £20 • HB

Humans have travelled into space for more than 60 years, not from necessity but in response to our desire to explore what’s beyond Earth. Future decades will continue to test how much we want and how much we need to send astronauts into Earth orbit or to the Moon and Mars. Space probes and rovers have explored these territories, and no one doubts that machines can perform in space more efficiently and less expensively, but can they equal human explorers’ abilities? This is the central focus of a book that asks whether, with the emergence of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the rapid development of