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Comment by onecommentman | Hacker News Reader

It has been thought that we infested each planet on which we dropped a probe with tardigrades, especially the earlier missions. Inadvertently infecting the Solar System is one argument against space exploration...humans are just too dumb and clumsy at this point.

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What makes you say this? The potential to contaminate other planets with life from Earth has been a concern ever since we started planning to put something on a different planet or the moon. This originally got its start in 1958 with the draft of a Planetary Protection Policy [1]. This was prior to the first landing of anything on a body in outer space with Luna 2 in 1959 [2]. This was by the USSR and granted there is not great documentation for anything they actually did, the USSR said they took precautions to prevent biological contamination.

For NASA they have been using the planetary protection guidelines since the first lunar lander which was the Ranger mission [3]. Every NASA mission that goes to another planet is required to undergo sterilization using the "Dry Heat Microbial Reduction"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Space_Research#Pl...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_2#Payload

[3] https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection#

Edit: Spelling

The Moon is not a protected environment under Planetary Protection guidelines. Also the rules apply to much larger payloads. Don’t forget the Apollo astronauts left nearly 100 bags of excrement on the Moon.

Facing the choice of whether to explore space, consider the worst case scenario. If we explore space, we could potentially destroy the evidence of non-Earth life that we are trying to find. The worst-case scenario from a anthropocentric point of view is that we don't get evidence of non-Earth life. If we do not explore space, we guarantee that worst case scenario. And, ultimately, we doom all Earth-life to extinction in a billion or so years; an extinction we may be able to prevent.

The morality of destroying non-Earth life doesn't seem to enter into your analysis.

This is a simplified analysis. On balance, I don't think there is any consistent moral basis for objecting to space travel that is based on not accidentally destroying non-Earth life. Did you have a specific objection in mind?

Saying, "It is immoral to risk destroying non-Earth life," would not be enough. One argument is a sort of recursive argument that humans are the best hope for Earth life in the long term, they are also the best hope for solar system life in general. All solar system life is equally doomed—albeit at potentially longer timescales than Earth life.

Why is spreading life seen as a negative? There are still an unfathomable number of planets without life. Isn't spreading life a good thing?

It would be poetic if tardigrades end up colonizing other worlds hundreds of years before we do.

Perhaps they already have!

The danger is if there is already some life that we're not aware of, then our tardrigades screw up their environment, eventually killing them. We don't want our tiny bacteria killing their tiny bacteria.

It’s worth pointing out that Tardigrades aren’t bacteria and couldn’t wipe them all out.

They are animals, vastly larger than bacteria that require a diet of plants and even smaller animals to survive.

Edit: plants not planets.

Nice typo.

It is illogical to have such disregard for the prime directive.

The Prime Directive prohibits contact with intelligent pre-warp civilizations.

Starfleet colonized quite a few planets without existing intelligent life.

Considering recent events, I'm not so sure if there is intelligent life on Earth. We are ripe for being colonized by what would be the Starfleet of a different star system, even if they have a Prime Directive.

Star Trek violated the Prime Directive in just about every episode. (They wouldn't have had any plots if they didn't.)

And they discovered that Tardigrades are probably already everywhere, since they can travel through the mycelial network

It's illogical to keep ecosystems alive that could potentially harm us and it's illogical not to spread ecosystems that are habitable for us.

Does morality come into this?

To the extent that we accidentally contaminate the moon -- with life, radioactive material, etc -- we screw up some of our ability to study the origins of life, the solar system, etc. And we don't materially seed the universe with more life in the process.

But then again, astronauts have been there, and the practices that were used were not (could not be) completely sterile. Still, this is probably a bit worse.

There 200+ moons in our solar system alone and an uncountable number outside it. Each second we delay space travel, millions of moons are consumed by black holes or obliterated by asteroid collisions.

If humanity became space-fairing earlier, perhaps we could save some of them. We're probably committing more alien genocide by delaying space travel than we ever would through contamination.

I never said to delay space travel. But that doesn't mean "seed the moon with Tardigrades" either.

Ensuring that our spacecraft are 100% sterile costs significant money and time.

Maybe there are some things we can do that provide high ROI, but my inclination is that building bases and having humans basically live on the moon is going to require giving up its sterility.

Sure... AGAIN, the horse is already somewhat out of the barn on the Moon in particular (human spaceflight already went there, I think), but this tardigrade thing, in retrospect, was extremely stupid.

> delaying space travel

In the context of space and time in the universe delaying things by a century or two is like delaying something in our life by a blink of an eye.

In the context of humanity, delaying things by a century or two may be spending all the time we have.

On our planet, I’m very much in favour of hurrying to ensure our planet remains a lot more habitable than Mars. And I’m hard pressed to believe that keeping our planet habitable is more difficult than making Mars habitable, so escaping to Mars doesn’t seem to be a solution to the finality of things.

And therefore our species leaving the planet really implies leaving our solar system. And I’m hard pressed to see that possibility defined by a couple of centuries. So we better make our planet work for a very long time.

Mars being really habitable isn't too likely for a long time. But an industrial economy in space, with space power generation and providing additional resources and headroom for mankind on Earth, is attainable in 60-100 years. And mankind being fully self-sufficient out there off the planet may be possible in 200 years.

I'm honestly not sure. Why would it be?

Because one could end up with invasive life brought from Earth, just like it happened with cats brought to isolated islands that had endemic species of birds with no predators.

The counter argument is that if the life we inadvertently leave throughout the solar system thrives, that's an interesting result too. This only really becomes a problem if there was other life to begin with.

What would the tartigrades eat? Surely they would die off eventually due to a lack of an ecosystem - no matter how hardy they are.

They don't eat, they're dehydrated and passive without any metabolism until (if) they are rehydrated.

What would they eat if they were rehydrated?

Presumably whatever food people provide with the water.

Cheese

For awhile they could survive on a carnivorous diet by eating eachother, but they would eventually need a source of algae/plant matter to thrive.

Like trisolarans then.

Until we explore and colonize space, we are one random asteroid away from human extinction. The odds in any given year or small, but it's nevertheless an unacceptable risk.

We should do everything we can to spread our eggs into other baskets.

How would an asteroid cause human extinction?

We're far more adaptable than dinosaurs.

The asteroid that caused the KT extinction burned every exposed life form, including all the land plants. The atmosphere became incandescent. Anything that survived the inferno would have then had to deal with the clouds of ash blocking out the sun for years.

It’s possible some small groups of humans could survive that, if they were survivalist types with bunkers and years of food, but it would be dicey.

Dinosaurs were around for a fair amount of time.. as were and still are, perhaps, cockroaches and dragon flies.

it's not impossible, but this could be how Earth got tardigrades in the first place.

(it's a stretch, of course.)

One might say, if we are the only life to enjoy the solar system (in any reasonable proximity), then does it really matter?

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