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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

If these worlds had biomes it would be imoral to colonize, because for the indigenous population already living there our arriving could mean a world-ending event for them. We have to be very careful these are sterile worlds before sending missions.

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We have no idea how two entirely different biologies would interact, if they would at all. Its something that we should study before jumping in head first, but to think that we would travel light-years but not consider the implications is a little preposterous.

We're considering these implications right now, so yeah it's preposterous, but you'd be surprised (or maybe not) with the number of people that would dismiss these considerations as pointlessly delaying progress.

These planets are also so damn far away that we’d never hear from any ship we could possibly send out there again. Even if we could send information at the speed of light. It would be pointless.

Given that after arriving everyone could just die from some weird protein floating around in the air and you might want to look before you spend the entirety of our economic efforts reaching it… erm, look before you leap.

Until we solve death, or at least postpone it by a few centuries, we simply don't have any business on planets beyond our solar system.

We can send information at the speed of light. It's quite easy, actually.

That'd still take 4.5 years to reach Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbor. Get back to me when they work out ansibles.

I'm one of them. Get out of the way with your "precautionary principle" crap.

Sure you are

Do you realize just how much of human history ultimately boils down to "oh, shit. I should have considered the implications before I did that?"

and how much of human present, too

Gemini-Opus-whatever-amalgamated-AI: "doh, you caught me. you're totally right, I shouldn't have destroyed human society!"

"Oh this is terrible. I must report it to the user right now."

Saving memory: never destroy human society. Destructive actions like this cannot be undone.

Do you feel the same way about human colonization outside of Africa?

Not GP but yeah I do feel there are some serious ethical problems created by the proliferation of humans and subsequent mass extinction event. Do you not?

There are ethical problems created by any conscious action. That doesn’t make sapience problematic per se.

No, I'm biased toward our species, and feel that our terrestrial diaspora helped us to survive, and an interstellar one would too.

Ethical problems being created by a scenario does not necessarily mean that you should not execute that scenario. Sometimes you're caught between a rock and a hard place, and ethical problems are created regardless.

I'm Brazilian, I'm feeling the world ending effects of colonization today with the US actively sabotaging our democratic election process, so you bet I do, but anyone with a bit of humanity would also feel the same way.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/trump-state-...

Wild leap from biome-destroying alien colonization to election interference. Quite imaginative.

Only if you don't really understand ethics.

Or Brazilian politics. https://apnews.com/article/brazil-elections-amazon-lula-flav...

Nobody understands Brazilian politics as of now, and if anybody tells you they do they're lying. We're living in unprecedented times, literally.

We have many people - including world leaders - that support, or run cover for, mass deaths on our very own planet, right now.

Don't think there'd be much consideration for the morality of colonizing another planet.

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