SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 08 2017, @06:48PM (4 children)
No one in their right mind gives a small damn about "contaminating" a barren rock.
I agree. Now for the hard part: prove it's actually barren.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @07:28PM (2 children)
No.
Now what? Are you going to try to kill me to stop me from going?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:06PM (1 child)
No, because your dumb ass will die from radiation exposure on the way there.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 09 2017, @06:24AM
Fill the space vehicle walls with moon rock or comet water. Radiation protection solved.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @03:15AM
100% of the proof so far says it's barren, so say varied and repeated experiments.
If you were betting money on this, there would only be one logical way to bet.