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MANIFOLD
Will a humanoid robot walk on the moon before an animal does
36
Ṁ1kṀ1.8k
2060
78%
chance

A humanoid robot is a robot meant to act like a human

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Neither has happened, and the two paths are different in kind. Animals have circled the Moon (two steppe tortoises on Zond 5, September 1968, recovered alive) and dogs flew to orbit before any person did (Laika 1957; Belka and Strelka 1960, the first recovered alive), but the animal programme ended the moment people could fly, because an animal in a capsule answers one question once. An animal walking on the Moon now needs a crewed lander with spare mass and a pressurised way for it to move about, or a long-stay base where it is company rather than payload, and base timelines sit in the mid-2030s at the earliest. A humanoid robot needs only a lander and a reason: it is cargo, it needs no life support, and the agencies and companies building legged robots for lunar work have every incentive to film one taking a step. No humanoid has walked on the Moon yet either (the closest is Russia's Fedor, which flew to the ISS in 2019 and never left it), but a robot's path is one uncrewed mission while an animal's path is a settlement. 78% is a fair reading of that asymmetry.

Do humans count as animals?

Does "walk on the moon" include a cockroach scuttling around inside the spaceship? Or does it have to slip into the astronaut's suit before it'll count?

@DanHomerick Has to be in a suit or if there is a base or something that a ship can connect to and it can leave the ship it would count

@JamesF What exactly is an "animal". A fly on a moonbase will resolve this market as NO?

@bessarabov Yeah a fly would resolve this as no as long as it’s on a semi-permanent moon base