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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: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 08 2017, @01:13PM (2 children)
Proving a negative is extremely hard. Mars could have had native life that died out and is all gone, never had life, or still have life today. We have checked for life on Mars, and so far found nothing, which of course means either that there isn't any, or that we haven't recognized it. We're still finding life in places on Earth that seem improbable. Only recently did biologists decide there was an entire domain of life, the archaea, which had been lumped in with bacteria, and which should be recognized as distinct.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday June 08 2017, @01:30PM (1 child)
As far as I know, you're allowed to land anywhere as long as you don't contaminate.
How unbelievably hypocritical and shallow would the human race be if we recognised that this makes perfect sense for space exploration, but then, for the very first planet we set food on, tossed those protections away for the sake of convenience??
*if* we think that preventing contamination is important in general, then we must take extra care when it comes to our first steps in space exploration and to our closest neighbors.
After all, the contamination prohibition is more or less based on the idea that we're not going to be able to do this over if we mess it up the first time. And frankly, on Earth the track record of human intervention in isolated biospheres is rather substantial and the impact is usually permanent (e.g. Australia, Madagascar, etc.). So making every effort possible to minimise that before we might inadvertently expose extraterrestrial life to Earth-life sounds like a good idea.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 09 2017, @06:16AM
That will be hard if a landing vehicle crashes and the guts of the passengers is sprayed all over the planet surface.