Isaac Newton has an opinion on this.
Posted on 07/13/2015 1:43:10 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
WHEN can we declare the Red Planet a dead planet? Although most efforts so far have gone toward showing that other planets could support life, now is the time to think about the other side of the coin.
Spacecraft going to other worlds must follow costly planetary protection protocols, such as sterilisation, to avoid contaminating their destination with Earth microbes, putting any native life at risk, or bringing potentially dangerous alien ones back.
But if there’s nothing there, why bother? We haven’t found life on Mars yet, and if further missions also turn up nothing, at some point commercial space enterprises such as mining operations or tourism will want to avoid the costs of sterilisation.
The question has no simple answer, says Erik Persson, a philosopher at Lund University in Sweden – but that doesn’t mean we should dodge it.
Our track record on debating similar questions on Earth, like the use of genetically modified crops, is far from stellar. “On our planet, we usually have these kinds of discussions too late, either after the fact or when it’s about to happen and there are a lot of feelings,” Persson says. “At that stage, the discussion might not be as fruitful as it could be if we start earlier.”
That makes now the best time for scientists, legal experts and the public to start thinking about when and how we might relax planetary protection protocols if we decide another planet is lifeless, he says. “When the developers are on the launch pad, it’s too late,” he told the Astrobiology Science Conference in Chicago last month.
So far, most discussions on the protocols have been about how strict they should be, not when to end them.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
wishful thinking =/= actual science
there is ZERO evidence of life anywhere but earth.
that ALH84001 meteorite "hoax" from the late 90's was a case of a couple of NASA scientists trying to make names for themselves.
I don’t remember seeing that one, but that sounds like a very good plot.
From the plan i've heard, there is no need. They say the planet's atmosphere is so thick with Carbon dioxide, that larger containers would float on top of it. That just above the layer of Carbon dioxide is a massive layer of oxygen. That in this layer, the temperature is actually decent, like 70 degrees or so.
The idea is to make a large city held up in the sky by floating on the layer of carbon dioxide. The Idea has apparently been thought through quite a lot.
http://www.citylab.com/tech/2014/07/the-surprisingly-strong-case-for-colonizing-venus/373560/
NASA should just start building a Death Star. like, right now. this afternoon. we’re gonna need it eventually anyway.
They can’t admit that man, because then the whole jig would be up. If life can’t arise spontaneously from non-life, then it doesn’t matter how many planets, stars, and galaxies are out there. There would be no point to space exploration unless we can find some very valuable resource that would be economically feasible to haul back to earth.
As long as they keep up the assumption that life might spontaneously arise from nothing, then they can play their probabilities game and pretend like we might find something out there, if we just look long enough and hard enough.
Then, if you want to acid wash your jeans, just tie them to a rope and drop them into the lower atmosphere for a couple minutes.
Isaac Newton has an opinion on this.
Perhaps we need to demand the truth from scientists as well.
Those GMO scientists who swore they’d never cross pollenate other areas, wouldn’t ever travel anywhere else, knew they were lying. They can’t control the wind, the weather, the bees and other pollenators. They knew exactly what was going to happen but said it would not. They knew once it happened it couldn’t be stopped.
Attempting to find life on Mars is not about science. It’s a progressive attempt to prove that there is any life elsewhere in order to destroy the belief in God.
GENIUS!!!
I for one don't think it was ever about life on other planets, it was always plunder on other planets. Wait, that would be a great title for a B film :)
Well, there’s really no plunder out there, or at least none that we have found that is worth hauling back. So I think at some point, the bureaucrats decided to shift the mission to something that isn’t as easily quantified, like colonization, searching for habitable planets in other solar systems, etc. Those are much easier to sell to Congress than a program to get us resources that doesn’t produce any resources.
If there were any life on Mars, I’m sure Hussein would have sent a spaceship there by now
Full of EBT cards, voter registrations, piloted by community activists to tell them how racist terran whitey took the planet with all the water and forced their ancestors into the red ghetto /s
I always thought trying to find life elsewhere in the solar system would help us to better understand our own place in it. Is your faith so weak that finding life on another planet would destroy your belief in your Greek pantheon of Gods?
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