It's the fable of the tortoise and hare.

Sure, once you're on the surface, man craps all over robot.

But given the MUCH longer development time for manned over robots, Team Robot has already a 20 year head start.

And if each team had the same amount of money, then Team Robot can deploy 20,30,50 (some say 100) robots for every manned mission.

Name any budget - big or small. You'll get more science data from robots, not man. Manned missions waste too much budget on life support systems, redundancy, PR, and having to return to Earth. And the gap between capabilities is hopefully closing, despite the glacial pace of AI research. Robots can work 24/7 in extreme radiation environments with detectors that operate outside normal senses.

Yes, manned missions have political benefits. Sure, they're inspirational. And you can't put a value on that. But if you care purely about the science, then robot beats man when factoring in project time, safety and budget.

How much for one manned mission to Mars? $500B? Probably more. After all, look how much the ISS cost. For the SAME money, you have 10 x Curiosity 2.0 rovers on Mars PLUS major Cassini-class orbiters around ALL the planets and major moons, the Terrestrial Planet Finder, balloons in Titan's atmosphere & Venus' atmosphere, floating probes on Titan's lakes, ice-core driller on Europa and Enceladus, etc.

What'll it be? You can have one Chinese man plant a flag on Mars or you can flood the solar system with probes?

Obviously in an ideal world, it'd be nice to have both manned & unmanned, but given finite budgetary constraints, I'll take robots every time as you can have more of them deployed in more difficult, exotic and interesting areas.

Anyway, that's my little rant. And I'm a big AI skeptic.

It'll be interesting if China really do take up the baton of exploring the solar system - in the 1960s/70s, The USA & Soviets were all over Venus & Mars & Moon, launching Viking, Pioneer & Voyager. There were big 'tentpole' missions every year, and not just Apollo. There were even balloon probes floating in the atmosphere of Venus!
I wonder how long it'll be until China actually goes beyond USA/Soviets e.g. landing on Europa or orbiting Neptune. It'll go faster if data is shared, but if China have to re-invent the wheel, we'll be retirement age before anything happens.

We've had 40 years of great innovation in computer miniaturisation and CCD sensors, etc - so the next generation of probes should give us HD 3D 1080p video from the surface of other worlds.

Less than a week till Curiosity - that baby better land, otherwise there's nothing for quite a while.

The montage near the beginning of UP was unflinchingly adult. Among the most ballsy sequences Pixar ever did. The second half of the movie was your typical dumb chase-action stuff

I would watch a DUG spin-off movie by Pixar.

Yes, Nolan on IMAX is double density i.e. ultra high resolution image AND enough plot for two movies compressed into one. No time to marvel at the picture detail as you've got to hold on and keep up with developments. I've long noticed there's little or no repetition of important plot points with Nolan films. Go to the can at your own peril.

Did you see the running time? 164 minutes. Getting up to LOTR length, although Nolan doesn't do Extended Editions for any of his DVD/Blu-Ray releases.

Wow - a screenplay writer selling a spec script could pre-viz his entire vision for the dumb suits at the Studio.