NASA Planetary Protection Policy
planetaryprotection.nasa.gov
planetaryprotection.nasa.gov
Guess what? There are factions that are actively moving to make sure that doesn't happen. As it turns out, many believe that we need to be so cautious that even if we could get in a rocket tomorrow and go to Mars for ten bucks that we shouldn't be allowed to do that. At least not without a few committees meeting first and some ever-growing regulations being consulted. Some, I'm willing to believe, already feel very adamantly that mankind is a pestilence and should be prevented from spreading.
And each year those efforts get more and more organized.
In NASA's defense, this looks like something they've set up in order to head this issue off at the pass. So when somebody says "But what about us contaminating the Solar System!" they can point to some processes and rules that makes sure that the matter was considered appropriately.
But when folks ask me what mankind's future is, to me it looks a lot stagnation by our own hand. Pages like this do not do much to persuade me otherwise.
sigh
You can't. You establish a given threshold, after which it's no longer reasonable to maintain a quarantine.
Do you have a cite? Or are you talking about very many imaginary people?
Even if humans "infected" the whole solar system, how can we spread from there? The Centauri system is the next closest star system [1], most likely without planets there, and is over 4ly away. That's roughly 25 trillion miles away. If we could travel at the same speed as New Horizons (36,373mph) [2], it would still take 77.5 thousand YEARS to get there. [3]
We are not gonna pollute the universe and its a silly to think ourselves capable of such a feat.
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Near-star...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
[3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+to+travel+24.7+tri...
"There are elements trying to keep us from spreading throughout the universe" sounds incredibly paranoid.
In any event, how exactly do you differentiate earth-borne bacteria from non-earth-borne bacteria? What's your rubric?
Do you have any examples? This is interesting. Reminds me of the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy
[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743475186/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Setting them on planets other than Earth (although the third book takes place exclusively on Earth) provides an opportunity to examine closely-held beliefs commonly taken for granted.
Among other comments from his letters:
I don't of course think at the moment many scientists are budding Westons: but I do think (hang it all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston's is on the way ... a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the Universe.
He also liked to sign off his letters to Clarke with comments like, "I wish you every success except a practical realization of space travel".
edit: A bit more in the section "Lewis and space exploration" here: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1754/1
I wouldn't interpret his writings as anti-space-travel in any way, but you have to understand Weston's character arc across books 1 & 2. Lewis was arguing against the ideal that motivated many peoples' interests in space travel at the time, and the philosophical underpinnings of their views on morality and humanity.
I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that someone of Lewis' intellect would so readily throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater on one of the greatest frontiers of human exploration.
Here, this guy puts it much better than I did: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1754/1#IDComment332377...
Edit: Adding expository link.
There are 7 billion people on this planet. For every absurd and stupid notion, there are millions of adherents. But people who think that humanity must never colonize other planets don't matter because:
1. They have no power
2. We're not going to colonize anything in the next few decades anyway; sending people to Mars would cost a trillion dollars and no one is interested in paying for that
I mean, you're taking something very simple, namely, a science organization takes some precautions to keep their scientific instrument from ruining the experiment it is going to conduct, and reinterpreting it as part of some vast conspiracy. That's...not healthy.
Oh rubbish. It's basic lab protocol that you don't contaminate your samples, and we're at the very early stages of sample-gathering. We're just at the stage of figuring out whether Mars has ever had liquid water or not, so your worries about budget interplanetary travel being held up by interfering bureaucrats are almost comically premature.
To state that another way, some bad-ass aliens come along and decide to terraform Earth to their liking. It turns out they breathe 100% Helium, so they convert Earth's atmosphere to that.
How do you feel about terra-forming now?
[edit]
Methane or ammonia appear to be much more likely alternative, and no I wouldn't like Earth's atmosphere to be replaced with it.
While I'm being a nitpicker Terra-form means roughly "to make like Earth" so it specifically refers to making a planet more like Earth.
> While I'm being a nitpicker Terra-form means roughly "to make like Earth"
Substitute whatever word the aliens have that means "to make like home planet" then.
As humans, we seem to think we're the most important thing getting around. Even your comment suggests killing off humans is much worse than killing of bacteria on Mars.
Back to my story, the bad-ass aliens might very well look at us just like you're looking at the bacteria on Mars.
What's the difference? (nothing)
Turning this into an existential question for the humans does not invoke the morality you are looking for.
This form of argument only works on Earth because humans are the most important thing around, and it can be safely assumed that all human-capable things are humans and therefore you can make moral arguments based on the Golden Rule with the safe assumption that we are all working on the same basic desires. As soon as you introduce true aliens into the mix you can no longer make this assumption. You need to establish from some sort of more basic first principle why this is a bad idea.
Might I also add that from my point of view, the question is, which do you prefer, a bare sterile ecosystem barely hanging on and marking time until the sun sterilizes it, or the sort of rich vibrant ecosystem that we can build by terraforming, bringing life abundant to a place nearly sterile. Even on its own terms the snap "Don't touch anything!" is not the life friendly answer you are probably casually assuming. The ecosystem that will exist AD 100,000,000 is quite different depending on whether we terraform or not. (Again, the snap "Don't touch anything!" is itself a terra-centric viewpoint. On Earth you can assume there's a rich ecosystem pretty much where ever on the planet you point, and you can sort of leap to the conclusion that extensive human interference will at least not make it richer. In space, you can't make that assumption.)
In fact this whole thing ends up cutting to the question of exactly how do you compare two possible ecosystems and decide which is better, a question that environmentalists have to date not really had to face but is one of crucial importance even here on Earth, and completely unavoidable in space. If you're up for a challenge, try to rigorously explain why it's important that we leave a starving, barely-functional ecosystem alone for a hundred million years instead of terraforming the place and then in a hundred million years having a rich, varied Martian ecosystem.
> We're capable of thought, and bacteria aren't.
When the bad-ass aliens come along they'll say "We're capable of faster than light travel, humans aren't."
Think about this from the outside perspective for a second.
2. I don't see any reason why eradicating non-sentient bacteria is immoral. Outside perspective doesn't matter on this point; see 1.
That's because (according to humans) we are the most important thing getting around. No other species has the mental capacity to even consider this point, though every species acts in its own self interest.
To put it another way, do you think beavers care about disenfranchised fish or animals downstream when they build a dam and reproduce? Should they? According to you beavers should seriously consider the ramifications of their behavior. Haughty beavers...
I'm not saying we should completely disregard other species or go around destroying life needlessly, but that killing off humans is much worse than killing off bacteria, from a human perspective. Your assertion to the contrary is lunacy.
Exactly. I introduced another perspective into the picture so that people can see this from a perspective other than a human one.
The difference being that maintaining a habitat takes a lot of technology that is constantly kept in working order.
In the end, that last % is probably not that significant, specifically because space-based habitats have a very strong advantage over planets -- planets are much rarer. The solar system can sustain many millions of space stations with >1M pop each, with cheap travel between them. I'd estimate that complete system-wide reversal to barbarism is pretty damn rare in that situation.
How will we land humans on Mars without contaminating the planet?
I mean, Mars's atmosphere is mostly CO2, and bacteria are well-known for their ability to survive in harsh conditions. There may not be life on Mars now, but who's to say there won't be after all the astronauts leave...?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_the_Moon
The minerals they could get from soil, but without nitrogen they can't make proteins. The atmosphere of mars is 2.7% nitrogen, but I'm not convinced that that is enough for nitrogen fixation to work.
- A useful resource for studying terrestrial planets - A geologists dream land - A lifeless rock that will likely never host life unless terraformed - A useful resource for spreading life; extending the Human race's finite time in the Universe
I'm not very educated on the ethics of this topic so I'm looking for reasons you would want to leave Mars be indefinitely.
If there's no life on Mars, I don't see any obvious ethical problems with introducing life to it.
I mean, I guess maybe if it there was some reason it would be bad for the life forms, versus being bad for Mars.
Agreed that first you need to establish that. But once we've searched enough, shouldn't we send tiny ecosystems kind of stuff and try to spread whatever life we can?
No sterilization technique is 100% perfect, and whatever contamination might happen is strongly determined by the one mission with the least effective sterilization, which is probably about equal as determined by the interplanetary environment, with variations for duration of flight and strength of solar radiation spikes (and assuming no significant variation over time in cosmic rays). To the extent pre-launch sterilization makes any difference, the earliest landers on other planets probably had the least effective sterilization techniques. For example, the Viking landers were sterilized by exposure to heat at 111 degrees Celsius, but the known upper limit of survival and proliferation temperature for thermophilic archaeans has since increased several times, with the most recent value I'm aware of at 122 degrees Celsius. The Soviet Union landed several probes on Mars and had a program of sterilizing them, but I'm not aware of the details. There was at least one science fiction story where astronauts on Mars discovered microbes that turned out to have evolved from microbes from one of the Soviet landers.
We also know that interplanetary space is not a sterile barrier over long time scales, and that there has been exchange of rocky material between Earth and Mars throughout the history of the Solar System, of which ALH84001 is a recent example. It's conceivable that radiation-hardened microbes such as deinococcus radiodurans could survive the radiation exposure of the trip, while the interiors of such rocks could protect them from the thermal spikes and mechanical shocks of excavation and landing.
Even what precautions our anti-contamination policies have included might have been counterproductive, such as sending the Galileo probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter to prevent the chance of it striking one of the Galilean moons in the future. Even if Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are all teeming with life in sub-surface oceans, it seems like having a 50-ish mile shield of ice between the ocean and a crash-landed probe sitting in the vacuum and hard radiation environment of space is pretty good insurance. But the choice was dictated by humanity's assumption of lots of liquid water as a paramount determinant of the possibility of life. That might be chauvinistic based on our biosphere sample size of one. If you relax your assumptions for the conditions necessary for life to arise and evolve to just a relatively stable space with chemical complexity and energy, the atmospheres of the gas giants become candidates. If you integrate the possibility of life first arising over a volume of space as well as duration of time for the candidate environment, Jupiter becomes overwhelmingly the most likely candidate environment in the solar system for life to have arisen. And unlike the thick ice envelopes of the moons, exposure of the Galileo probe to any portion of the atmosphere of Jupiter is potentially exposure to the entirety of the planet.
It makes sense to take reasonable precautions, but we can't expect to be able to ensure 100% lack of contamination from any spacecraft. And while there are good analytical reasons to believe there is no threat from back contamination to the Earth's biosphere from possible extraterrestrial microbes from a robotic or crewed sample return mission, there's no substitute for experimental evidence, in the form of living things from Earth living and growing on Mars without being hermetically sealed from the Martian environment. It would be fantastic to land at least a robotic greenhouse on Mars, like Chris McKay and then Elon Musk were promoting several years ago, and be able to watch plants and flowers from Earth growing on Mars.
Ultimately, it's not any more unlikely for Earth life to spread to Mars as it was for life on Earth to spread out of the oceans and onto land.