
Dormant Earth germs could spring to life in a Martian puddle - legodt
http://www.wired.com/2016/08/shouldnt-go-mars-might-decimate-martians/
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danieltillett
We are only 3.7 billion years too late to be worrying about this. Earth rocks
containing viable microbes have been landing on Mars for billions of years. I
can't find a reference, but my memory is the rate is around 100 kg per year.

Edit. Found some references [1 - 3].

1\.
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11543506](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11543506)

2\. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0101.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0101.pdf)

3\. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.0378.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.0378.pdf)

~~~
LukeB_UK
> _Conley has a response to this argument. Even if a microbe on Mars shares
> the same deep origins as us, a few thousand years down a separate
> evolutionary pathway would still make them pretty alien indeed. But
> ultimately, the best case for caution, and for planetary protection, may be
> simply to point to all the ways in which our knowledge of Mars has changed
> just in the past few years. Curiosity ended up almost on top of possible
> liquid water because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. In a way, Conley’s
> deepest arguments boil down to a quote from Haldane: “The universe is not
> only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”_

~~~
davidiach
But if 100kg of Earth material makes it's way to Mars every year, it means
Mars has already been contaminated this year as well as in 2015, 2014 and so
forth.

Personally I'm for being cautious as well but there are always trade-offs and
we must understand that.

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jkot
It takes easily a few million years to travel from Earth to Mars.

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fit2rule
The interesting thing is, this represents a snapshot of Earth lifeforms over a
period of a million years. If there is a mass spectra of such ejecta out
there, who knows what it may yield ..

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frandroid
> Her official title is US planetary protection officer

It's amusing that "US" has made it into her title, but it's pretty cool that
there's a Prime Directive office.

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willismichael
That is rather silly, kind of like being a Texas International Diplomat or
something.

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progressive_dad
More like being a UN human rights peace keeper.

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ourmandave
Hosing the Martian biosphere as an invasive species seems inevitable so we may
as well do it right and plan the thing out.

Rule 1: No single-point-of-failure (e.g. every alien in _Independence Day, War
of the Worlds, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mars Attacks_ , etc.).

Rule 2: _Bio-Dome_ was a cautionary tale.

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Aelinsaar
Being careful is expensive, and as of this moment the people who are going to
be landing on Mars first want to make a profit. Considering how we treat life
that we're absolutely sure exists, and is a lot more complicated and near to
us than alien microbes, I have no doubt at all how this will play out.

Lets just hope that Mars is sterile when we get there.

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progressive_dad
Now I'm picturing martian sex tourism. Thanks.

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Aelinsaar
You know, I'm not sure how appropriate this is for HN, but it fits the
situation so perfectly and it's SFW so...

[http://45.media.tumblr.com/533291d1f4ccb721cd36baa04b97298e/...](http://45.media.tumblr.com/533291d1f4ccb721cd36baa04b97298e/tumblr_o0jmk1hHKk1ujuk5ho1_500.gif)

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legulere
Site is blocked if you use privacy tools like ghostery.

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Aelinsaar
Site is fine if you use Ghostery, NoScript, and Ublock Origin together though.

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mrks_
I think it's NoScript and/or Privacy Badger that's helping. I'm using uBlock
and Ghostery and it blocked me halfway through.

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gorhill
uBlock Origin alone is equipped to handle Wired's anti-blocker.

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Aelinsaar
I live in a combination of bliss that uBlock Origin exists, and mortal terror
that it's eventually going to go away.

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daveloyall
I thought we agreed to not post Wired stories until they stop punishing me for
blocking (via a hand-maintained hosts file) hosts that serve ads.

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wastedhours
No one agreed that - and it's getting exceptionally tiring the sheer amount of
snarky comment space dedicated to espousing adblocker privilege.

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daveloyall
I don't use an adblocker. Wired is the problem. I already wrote a letter to
their editor suggesting that they serve ads from their own domain--which I
have not set to 0.0.0.0 yet, out of respect for their contributions to the
development of my culture.

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maverick_iceman
Small time bureaucrat throttling enterprising scientists.

~~~
greglindahl
She's a smart scientist who has published quite a lot of important research.

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sevenless
I don't see why we're obliged to care about the sanctity of Martian life. It's
not an ethical question, because it doesn't involve harming any sentient
being: living species don't have any inherent right to exist. Species go
extinct on Earth all the time, and we aren't obliged to resurrect them.

Making humans better off (through advancing science, off-world colonization or
mining) is an absolute good, and it should always take precedence over the
possible extinction of non-sentient species.

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pop8row9
Ethics is changing: living species do have an inherent right to exist, I
assert.

The only item which is an absolute good is the end of human killing and
torture in all its forms.

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sevenless
Species evolve into other species all the time, and go extinct all the time.
This is a natural, inevitable, and ethically neutral event. Probably billions
of species have gone extinct in Earth's history. Nobody's rights are violated
if it happens. If it were ethically bad, we would be obliged to somehow stop
all evolution and extinctions from happening.

Individual beings (humans, maybe some animals) have rights; groups of
individuals are not individuals themselves, and have no rights, not even the
right to exist. This is even the case if the individuals are humans; if they
are bacteria, the case is much weaker, as bacteria have no right to life (we
kill millions of them every second just by being alive).

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xapata
Are you trolling? The United States and most countries, AFAIK, have laws
protecting endangered species.

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logfromblammo
None of those laws apply on Mars, or anywhere else outside the Earth
ecosystem.

The only people who might be negatively impacted by destroying any (or all)
native Martian organisms are research biologists and pharmaceutical
manufacturers, and they still have plenty of work to do with Earth species.

We can afford to debate the ethics of genociding xenospecies on other planets
_after_ we have replicated the Earth biosphere on a second planet. It sucks
for Martian life--if it exists--but Earth needs Mars before exporting Solar
life to other star systems. Martian species can either evolve enough to make a
useful contribution--or at least enough to ask for mercy--or they can die and
get out of our way.

That is the cost here. Are you willing to sacrifice every living human (or
human successor species) in existence a few billion years from now for the
sake of some suspected xenobacteria now? I am not. Protect Martian species at
the expense of Earth species at your own peril. Attempting a Greenpeace-style
"save the xenobacteria" sit-in will just get you thrown out of the airlocks.

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xapata
> None of those laws apply on Mars

The article states that the US and the Soviets signed a treaty to protect
alien life, so I guess they're saying we have an international law that
applies on Mars.

Yes, I know the Soviet Union doesn't exist any more.

> sacrifice every living human

... I don't think you read the article thoroughly.

~~~
logfromblammo
I didn't think it required a _thorough_ reading. The Planetary Protection
Office _is_ a farce, in my opinion. Even if there were species on Mars to
protect, they're going to have to fend for themselves against potentially
superior Earth organisms. That's how life works; red in tooth and claw. I am
actually of the opinion that we should intentionally infect all of our space
probes with as many extremophiles as we can before sending them up, on the off
chance that if Earth were destroyed tomorrow, that one lonely surviving
bacterium might give the next planet a head start on DNA-based life.

And I was referring to the eventual destruction of Earth itself by the
expansion of the sun. Or any other mass-extinction event, really, but that's
the nearly guaranteed, almost inevitable one.

If humans do not transplant Earth life to other planets as _quickly and
cheaply_ as possible, out of fear of potentially destroying any native
xenospecies that may exist, the gap in expenses and technical requirements may
prevent that transplantation from ever occurring on a grand enough scale to
matter. Earth life will then be destroyed when Earth is destroyed. I'm not
going to doom trillions of organisms on the possibility that they might infect
other planets. _Colonizing other planets is the biggest point in favor of
having a space program!_

\--

In the US, a treaty requires implementing legislation to be binding on the
subjects rather than just the government. Any such law would only be _de
facto_ applicable to American or Russian [0] subjects _returning to Earth (and
specifically the US or Russia) from Mars_. Anyone _remaining on Mars_ could
simply renounce citizenship and thumb his or her nose at the blue planet.
Without such a law, the US would be responsible for breach of the treaty, and
the person doing the act that triggered the breach would be blameless.

It would be analogous to attempting to enforce English colonial laws in Boston
after 1783, except it would take the cops 2.5 years to get there before they
could even begin to try to arrest you.

[0] I think Russia is the designated successor state to most, if not all, USSR
treaties.

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xapata
> I didn't think it required a thorough reading.

I guess you missed the part where Conley talked about how short her time-frame
is for observing any (potentially) undisturbed aliens, because she assumes
we'll be sending humans to Mars in the next few decades.

She also didn't discuss the ethics of killing aliens. Instead the article
explained the scientific benefits of analyzing alien life.

