‘Tardigrades on the Moon Is Not Good’ | Hacker News Reader

‘Tardigrades on the Moon Is Not Good’

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15 pointsneom24 comments

> What you are doing is showing excitement at the long history of forcing OUR values, systems, and in this case, living beings on another world. That is not our right, and it is not our job. If we carry on with that mentality, even if we took away the ‘colonization’ word the premise is the same. It’s colonialism. It’s imperialism.

hmm, defending the rights of non existent beings from colonialism on a barren inhospitable moon? cmon it's a frickin postage stamp load of water bears... Let get real, if they manage to populate a single crater it will be a miracle, and no Moon creatures are likely to be harmed since they are so elusive.

[edit]

So, it seems this person has a bit of an anti planetary colonization, anti planetary contamination... anti planetary pretty much anything that comes in physical contact with it agenda:

http://astrobiology.com/2019/07/absolute-prioritization-of-p...

Elon Musk is not going to like this person.

If it were up to that person, we should all backmigrate to Africa and depopulate Eurasia, The Americans, Australia and Oceania because we’re not native to them and have colonized them over tens of millennia. Wonder if they themselves followed through with their own advice.

Where did they say that?

Reductio ad absurdum

Not trying to be combative, but I find it interesting that you specifically note that you think "Elon Musk is not going to like this person".

Is there a specific reason that you feel like that and wanted to note it? I know he's usually known for being rather outspoken about his chosen method in a given field of space exploration.

> I find it interesting that you specifically note that you think "Elon Musk is not going to like this person". Is there a specific reason that you feel like that and wanted to note it?

He wants to colonize Mars, he has stated this desire in great detail publicly on multiple occasions.

Being so fanatical about "contaminating" the Moon with tardigrades doesn't bode well for the person's opinion of "contaminating" Mars with human presence.

Let's say that we're talking about Earth, and the prospect of contamination by some invasive life form from wherever. Would you be OK with that?

But even if we set aside morality, contaminating stuff makes it harder to know whether there was life there already.

It's different. Earth already has intelligent life. Mars and the moon do not.

The “astrobiologist” who claims sending tardigrades to the Moon is imperialism and colonialism is a counter-example to your claim that Earth already has intelligent life.

If tardigrades were capable of reproducing on the moon it'd already be colonized. There has been more than enough impact ejecta in the last 530 million years to land living tardigrades on the moon long before humans even evolved.

Nasa gives themselves and humanity too much credit.

Universe don't care about anything of this. It births and kills billions of stars in a blink of a second, shatter and reshape planetary systems and obliterate entire galaxies while some scientists are thinking of decontamination protocols and coming with pretentious ideas that anything they do has any resemblance of importance.

i have a hard time believing that the first moon missions were completely sterile and that they didn't already leave lots of potentially living matter behind.

and don't we want to colonize the moon? and mars? if we do, i think we need to throw out any pretense that we can control what gets sent up there.

i mean, it is worth to have a debate and consider the side effects, but it's way to late for a "must not send living matter to the moon" stance.

the only thing not good here is that this living cargo was apparently kept secret.

send to the moon whatever you want, but please be open about it, so that we can observe it and have a scientific debate about the risks and effects.

No, it's actually good. We need to terraform the Moon and get an ecosystem going. This will be much simpler to do than on Mars due to the distances involved.

Is terraforming the moon even possible? I was under the impression it had too little gravity to ever hold onto an atmosphere. Mars, OTOH, at least already has a thin atmosphere to work with.

The issue with atmosphere escaping can be solved by building transparent eco-domes that would allow sunshine in, but prevent the air from leaking out.

yeah there is no ethics in space. leave ethics and all the human drama on earth and colonize space. there is nothing to protect out there. there is only stuff to protect on earth.

except Europa

Attempt no landings there.

Part of the reason we're going out there is to find out whether or not we're alone in the universe and to learn more about how we ourselves might have come to be.

I think there's a balance to be struck between planetary protection and getting humans out there. No matter what, once we send humans somewhere, there will be contamination, but we should at least make a good effort to avoid contamination when possible.

No we should not. We should be expedient and expansionary in space not stiffing any opportunity with any unnecessary rules. After a thousand or few thousand years when there are plenty of humans out there laws will automatically follow. For instance if someone wishes to do research to create animals that can survive on different planets to genetically engineer bacteria to do the same we should not get in their way.

The only downside of such thinking is whether we can trust what we engineer for out there not to contaminate our planet, which is a much bigger issue / risk.

> Mary Ann Cramer : I have to ask you the same question people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home.

> Cmdr. Jeffrey Sinclair : No. We have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.

Space colonization == survival. So yes, we should have colonial attitudes, and no, they're not the same as imperialism.

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