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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

At some point we'll either have to either stop worrying about life on Mars being hidden under a rock somewhere or forever put a "humans keep out" sign on Mars.

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I'm kinda of this thought process as well. If there are hospitable conditions there and we haven't found microbes after a while, I think we should just start dumping tons of them over there. We need something to put some atmosphere there for us. Algae seems to be a really good bet.

And suppose we do find some biological slime there? Does that then make Mars off limits to all of humanity for all time?

It's time for us to accept that we implicitly modify everything we touch. Prime directive needs to have some detectability metric by which we decide it's OK for us to go gangbusters. If the native martian amoebas cannot survive with us present then they lose the evolution race, sorry.

Besides, if there are primitive life forms on Mars, it's quite presumptuous of us to assume we could so easily wipe them out.

While I agree with the general idea, I also hope that, if there are more advanced civilizations out there and they find us, that they don't consider us "native amoebas".

Me too, although our morality doesn't influence their choices unless we can communicate with them and/or realistically fight for our survival. Do you think there are races out there quietly observing our behavior and preparing their verdict? If so, I sure hope we are given awareness of membership in the law before the sentencing.

I seriously doubt anything at all will be found living on Mars, and if there is, it'll be primitive slime.

Mars becomes infinitely more interesting if it can become a host for terrestrial life.

I always thought that the main reason for being careful about bringing microbes to Mars is so that it is easier to tell whether any microbes we find on Mars evolved there. I thought that being careful about bringing microbes to Mars will stop being important to most of the people who currently care about it after we determine where any microbes we find there evolved. Was I wrong about that?

In that scenario you're saying that the Martian landscape itself is not worthy of preservation, while any microorganisms could be. Both amoeba and rocks have no claim to consciousness etc., so why is one worthy of preservation while the other is not?

OP is not interested in preservation for preservation's sake.

It's not like we should care about the consciousness of microbes. What he meant, as I read it, is that if there are microbes we'll want to sample them and study them BEFORE we change the landscape and possible kill them.

If there were life on Mars. It will be the our first, and may be the possible only, source of foreign life to study.

I don't think we want to contaminate or destroy our only source of knowledge on other kind of life.

May be we can do that later, once we study them enough or have kept it enough for further study. But let's not make our first decision be "We gonna destroy it someday anyway, let's just stomp on it carelessly right now"

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