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posted by on Thursday June 08 2017, @09:57AM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:41PM (#522848)

    No. Bacteria mutate and evolve very fast. Put bacteria in a hostile environment, and if _any_ of them survive, those survivors will reproduce and their progeny will rapidly become adapted to that environment. Humans who go there would be exposed to bacterial infections the likes of which their immune systems have never encountered before and to which they have no defense. See the history of American natives and smallpox for an example of why that doesn't end well. It applies also to viruses within a human population living within a closed and foreign environment. Evolution is driven by environment. New planet, new environment. This is a fundamental problem with any interplanetary settlements -- each human population will have rapidly divergent strains of flu and other diseases (due to very different environments, plus enforced separation due to distance) which could prove fatal to any other population upon contact. Ripley and Hudson could well be right: if just one of those (microscopic) aliens gets back to Earth, it's game over man. But the same can be true the other way: after a few generations it may be impossible for any humans to visit a Martian colony of humans without getting very sick or dying in that environment. We may spread life to that planet, but it will then diverge and evolve its own way, and there's no guarantee it'll remain compatible with its original source.

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