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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, Troll) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 08 2017, @04:07PM (4 children)
Am I missing something? This whole story seems to be about a giant strawman. Some dude named Zubrin is in favor of exploring and settling Mars, which isn't a unique viewpoint by any means, but he's claiming there's going to be some kind of "Planetary Protection" organization which will work to prevent this because of "contamination", so he then loudly argues against this hypothetical organization. This sounds like the ultimate strawman argument to me: "I want to do something, but I'm going to scream and yell about someone trying to stop me, even though no one is!". Is this guy getting paid for these speeches or something?
There is no "Planetary Protection community"; it's entirely a construct made up by this Zubrin guy AFAICT. So where is there even any debate about it? Does anyone with any real power (not just some hipster living in his parents' basement) actually hold this viewpoint, and intend to use real power to oppose Mars exploration? They haven't do so yet, and we've already sent a bunch of probes and rovers to the planet. This whole thing seems like a tempest in a teapot to me.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday June 08 2017, @04:42PM (2 children)
Not an organization per se, but a treaty. "Planetary protection" is a requirement of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, article IX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_protection#History [wikipedia.org]
So the "planetary protection community" would be the 104 nations that have ratified that treaty and therefore agreed to pursue such a policy. I don't think we can quite describe the United States Government as "some hipster living in his parents' basement" yet.. :)
Of course, we all know what the USG thinks of international law, or law in general. It'll hold only as long as they don't see any real incentive to get up there...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 08 2017, @06:00PM (1 child)
The US has already sent several rovers and landers to Mars, and the US and other nations (USSR, China, India) have landed on the Moon too, all well after this silly treaty was signed. There's no real "planetary protection community", just some language in an old treaty about being careful to not contaminate any place that might have life. And UN treaties have no real way of enforcing them anyway, unless the major players agree to (which is very rare). With the US, Russia, China, and India all happily sending probes and landers to other worlds, there's no sign that anyone is going to be very aggressive about this.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday June 08 2017, @07:09PM
That's not a conflict, it's the whole point! Article IX states (emphasis mine):
"...States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose..
Planetary protection isn't about keeping away, it's about exploring without destroying ourselves or the thing we're trying to explore in the process. Yes, we send rovers and even manned missions, but only after careful sterilization processes. They've been doing that since Apollo, and continue to do so with the more recent Mars missions:
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19750006598.pdf [nasa.gov]
https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/technology/is_planetary_protection.html [nasa.gov]
Yes, I believe I mentioned that as well...although damn near the entire world has signed on to this, and as most of them don't have space capabilities, they wouldn't have much to lose by trying to push for stringent enforcement. And those that do have space capabilities seem to be obeying it -- we've been doing this on every probe or craft we've sent up there for several decades now. This isn't an unenforced and ignored treaty, it's a treaty that was successfully implemented decades ago. As long as NASA is mostly in charge I expect that it'll be obeyed; but I do agree that if someone like the DoD decides to get more involved then all bets are off...
(Score: 2) by Weasley on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:58PM
Many in the space community argue that we shouldn't send humans to Mars due to contamination. It's a thing. No I'm not going to provide you sources. The fact you don't know who Robert Zubrin is means you probably don't follow the scene too closely and that's the reason you've never heard this argument before.