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from the puerile-plan-purports-to-prevent-pathogens dept.
Of late, [Robert] Zubrin has been bothered by another potential difficulty between humans and the exploration and settlement of Mars—planetary protection. This is the prime-directive-style notion that humans should not contaminate other worlds with Earth-based microbes and, on the flip side, that humans should not introduce any potentially dangerous pathogens to Earth.
[...] This is not a problem that NASA or would-be explorers should take all that seriously with regard to Mars, Zubrin argued during a characteristically fiery talk in late May. He made his remarks at the International Development and Space Conference in St. Louis, which is held by the National Space Society and dedicated to the settlement of space.
Zubrin asserted that Mars almost certainly has no life to be infected by Earth and no extant life which might eventually infect Earth. Mars has no liquid water on the surface, where temperatures are well below freezing, and an ultraviolet light would kill any new life.
[...] An overly zealous Planetary Protection community could also effectively kill human exploration on Mars, he argued, because there is no way to sterilize a crew, especially if the unthinkable happens. "If you maintain this pretense, a human expedition to Mars is impossible," he argued. "You cannot guarantee that a human mission to Mars won't crash, in which case you'll be scattering human microbes all over the surface."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mth on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:13AM (5 children)
I would be surprised if no life was found on Mars. Life is found on earth in places that haven't seen sunlight in millions of years, so why couldn't there be microbes in some underground water on Mars?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:33AM
That sounds like a better place to look than the topsoil. And if life can find a way on Mars, it could find a way on (in) Enceladus, Europa, Ceres, Titan, Ganymede, Callisto, Dione, Rhea, Titania, Triton, Pluto, Eris, Sedna, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday June 08 2017, @12:46PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @04:33PM
Life on Earth started under very specific conditions which have never occurred on Mars. Furthermore, the Martian environment is far more hostile to organic chemistry than Earth.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:04PM (1 child)
Well, there's not much of an atmosphere ("96% carbon dioxide, 1.93% argon and 1.89% nitrogen along with traces of oxygen and water"), or a magnetosphere at all. Isn't nitrogen a key component of most life on Earth, too?
I'd guess that doesn't rule out anaerobic bacteria, but after several rovers finding nada on the surface the odds don't seem very good.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 09 2017, @06:32AM
Which means life may very well be alive and well beneath the surface, in caves and in polar ice. Which hasn't been explored.