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Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

There are an enormous number of animals, rodents included, that are used in scientific experiments. Most of us believe it would be unethical to conduct the same experiments on humans without their consent.

Of course, these animals are not humans, and our ethics don't exactly map to their lives. It may ethically justified to use their lives for many types of scientific experiments. I am sometimes in this camp. Especially for medical science purposes, where the results of the research can be used to enrich all lives, even non-human lives.

It's hard for me to ethically justify this. Maybe I'd change my mind if it could be shown to me that this had potential to lead to important medical knowledge for humans and non-humans alike.

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Testing medication intake in space compared to on Earth, or the progression of diseases in space are a couple of examples that I can think of where having animals at ISS over longer periods of time could help tons of lives down the line. It's not a certainty, of course, but then again neither was any of the research done until now.

(I'm not here to start up a heated or judgmental comment thread here, because I do think conversations like these about ethics are illuminating, and that the interplay between general principles and an intuitive sense of justice is hard, and that I do want to genuinely engage in good faith with you...)

I hope, as a species, that we do become a spacefaring, exploring civilization – so that these mice will not have been euthanized in vain. It would be tragic if these mice died, for example, so that space can be militarized. My feelings tell me that so much relies on what this knowledge ends up being used for – which is intimately linked with what we end up doing with the fantastically expensive investment that is spaceflight.

Militarization is one aspect of becoming a space faring species. Like it or not it’s an aspect of social organisms competing with one another.

But would it make us more militarized than we already are? There's at least some chance we'll cooperate in space (like the ISS, for example).

I've worked on studies of mice that went to ISS. I understand the ethical concern. Ultimately, mice are used regularly as a model of human disease. The study I worked on specifically considered whether a particular treatment could help people in space avoid muscle and bone loss.

I agree, yet it still makes me feel a bit sick and sad. Thank you for your contributions to medical science.

I'm not weighing in on animal testing in general, but that goes for testing animal-targeted medications too. Rabies shots, heart worm, etc - no animals gave their consent for testing those.

And in this situation, the effects of weightlessness are being tested on humans as well, at the same time. This isn't animals being a buffer for humans. Will testing the effects of weightlessness on humans lead to important medical knowledge for humans?

If the average wild mouse lives a much shorter life does that help with the moral calculus? Nature is pretty brutal. I've seen crows get into a burrow of baby rabbits and it didn't end well for the bunnies. I'm guessing your average wild mouse has a pretty short life.

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