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Comment by chamakits | Hacker News Reader

This is a great analogy.

It was Indigenous People Day yesterday in the US (aka Columbus Day), and it made me think what an interesting time it must have been to be alive at a time where there were widely mostly unexplored areas in the world, and how incredulous and shocked people must have felt when they found out of these unexplored lands (putting aside the fact that it had been explored and lived by other cultures they did not know of).

Then I realized I do live in a time like that, with space exploration being that next frontier. What a time to be alive. I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further.

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Only this time without that unfortunate collateral damage to indigenous peoples!

That's my biggest fear about Mars. We don't have a great record on Earth and might not recognize the damage done until it's irreversible.

It is a dead rock.

1- Probably but not certainly, and a little caution (say, 100 more years of remote sensing exploration as technology improves) will go a long way.

2- I'm not so anthropocentric as to think that the only value in the universe is human value. It's not our universe; we're an infinitesimal fraction of it. Other life has inhabited earth for billions of years, and maybe other places too. The terrestrial or extraterrestrial environments have value for existing and future life, regardless of whether that is human life. And most of life isn't human, and won't be in the future either.

There is no sentient life in Mars. If there is microbial life on Mars, it is not making efficient use of its resources. I will not trade the billions of future people that might call a terraformed Mars home for some scum on the bottom of a rock.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I do wonder if life exists somewhere in the Universe that would view humanity in the same way.

No doubt. We'd best be ready. Thankfully astronomical data makes this unlikely at least in our stellar neighborhood, so we have some time to grow in both power and maturity.

We have a small chance of exploiting 1% of Mars in less than 100 years. The sooner we get our first factory there, the sooner we'll know if there is any reason not to build the millionth factory.

afraid we are going to mess up a lifeless rock

It doesn't need to be alive to be beautiful. There is great peace and beauty in empty places. Mars has grand and majestic vistas: canyons and plains, dunes and mountains. Reducing it in your mind to a lifeless rock obscures the awe and wonder. It is the opposite of appreciation, it makes the idea small in you, worthless and not deserving of respect.

There are infinite similarly dead rocks in the universe.

Similar [dead rocks], or [similarly dead] rocks ?

Also, I think there are only finitely many eventually observable planets in the universe?

All of that requires an observer there to appreciate it. Messing up the scenery of Mars with industry is a champagne problem.

That is your perspective that it is beautiful. What if my perspective is that it is more beautiful inhabited, alive, and sustaining an ecosystem it probably hasn't for millions of years?

Beauty is really subjective.

You three sound like the argument between Sax Russell and Ann Clayborne in the Mars trilogy. If you haven't read them, I recommend them.

"Ruining a mountain side" is one thing when it sustains an ecosystem of life. It's harder to argue we are ruining something like a planet with no life.

Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility until man-kind had achieved 20th century medical technology.

Even then it would have extremely struggled to handle 30+ million new cases of Small Pox, TB, Bubonic Plague, etc.

Luckily as far as modern technology can show we're extremely certain Mars has no life we'll accidentally genocide while exploring/terraforming.

> Sadly the pathogen make up of the Americas made safe exploration an impossibility

Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America.

I wouldn't call a slow migration that has no written record on the same scale as the exploration of the new world.

>Indians had no trouble crisscrossing America

Well yeah there weren't any human infectious illness where... there aren't any humans.

This video explains the history of man kind's infectious illness very well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

And Europeans had no trouble crossing Europe.

A single smallpox laden explorer would have started a plague in the Americas and a single native American would likely have died of one of the many plagues in Europe that Europeans had grown up with (and still often died from).

The problem of safety is not always placed on the explorer, sometimes the explorer is the danger to his environment.

The point is that entire classes of extremely common diseases in Europe basically didn't exist in all or most of the Americas, and many of those diseases spread very easily once even a handful of people had carried them across the ocean.

I think you mean intelligent life, as I'm pretty sure there are no people inhabiting Mars, native or foreign, at this time.

I think that's his point. If they're not there, they're not able to be collaterally damaged.

If there is intelligent life (or, any life as we define it generally), there's a pretty high likelihood our arrival could damage it, especially if we don't discover it until after arrival. (And "really especially" if we go the terraforming route)

Gah, you're right. I read it as we mustn't... rather than there aren't any so we can't. My mistake.

>I can't wait to be in absolute disbelieve of all the worldful discoveries that will be made when we expand space exploration further.

You've got to be kidding. What "wonderful discoveries" do you think there's going to be out there?

There might really be alien civilizations and worlds with lush vegetation out there somewhere, but for the foreseeable future, we're going to be limited to our own Solar System. The worlds here are not unknowns: we've been observing and probing them for many years now, and we know pretty well what's on them.

There's all kinds of interesting things on these worlds, from a scientific perspective: gas/ice giants, oceans of methane on Titan, a weird hexagonal pattern in Saturn's atmosphere, ice mountains on Pluto/Charon, etc. But we're finding all this out just fine using robotic probes. I'm sure we'll find out more, and refine our knowledge further, with continued robotic missions.

But if you're thinking that there's any good reason for humans to fly around the solar system and live on other worlds here, there just isn't any good case for it: none of the other habitats are remotely livable (the closest is the upper atmosphere of Venus of all places, if you really like the idea of living in a dirigible), and so the only real economic case to be made is mining. Most likely, we'd get a lot more mineral resources out of asteroids rather than planets or moons.

But this isn't like Star Trek with all kinds of fantastical worlds out there to discover, plus alien cultures to make contact with. They might be out there, way out there, but we're still struggling with the idea of how to travel to our very nearest neighboring star system (Alpha Centauri), which is about 4 light-years away. Maybe this will all change if Zephram Cochrane invents the warp drive, but for now, there just isn't much reason for humans to do anything more than basic science missions in space, and hopefully asteroid-mining missions in the near future. We're not going to make any huge new discoveries any time soon, just more thing like "ooh, look at these weird ice mountains on this dwarf planet!". That's really interesting, don't get me wrong, and a great reason to send a robotic probe, but it's not like we're going to discover anything truly groundbreaking here in our own system. According to all our data, all the other worlds here are lifeless rocks or frozen wastelands or gas giants. This isn't such a great "time to be alive"; that time was back in the 60s-70s when they were first discovering stuff in space with the Apollo missions and various probes like Voyager, Mariner, etc. (and maybe in the 2000s when all the pictures from the Mars rovers started coming in; but how many pictures of red rocks on a red sky do you need to see before you realize there's nothing more to Mars than that?).

It just isn't like the days when "the New World" was discovered, and Europeans were able to learn of and bring back fantastic new foods like cocoa/chocolate, maize/corn, learn about new cultures and brutalize them and steal their gold, etc. It's much more like exploring Antartica: it's a very interesting place for scientists, and absolutely worthwhile to do science missions on, but for everyone else the only possible reason you'd go there is as a tourist for a very short time because it's uninhabitable (though far more easily inhabited than Mars; at least there's breathable air there, and plenty of water just lying on the ground, there's even penguins and fish if you get hungry).

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