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Why is spreading life seen as a negative? There are still an unfathomable number of planets without life. Isn't spreading life a good thing?
by aeternum 6y ago
Why is spreading life seen as a negative? There are still an unfathomable number of planets without life. Isn't spreading life a good thing?
- JauntTrooper 6y agoIt would be poetic if tardigrades end up colonizing other worlds hundreds of years before we do.
- aeternum 6y agoPerhaps they already have!
- dyingkneepad 6y agoThe danger is if there is already some life that we're not aware of, then our tardrigades screw up their environment, eventually killing them. We don't want our tiny bacteria killing their tiny bacteria.
- temp0826 6y agoIt is illogical to have such disregard for the prime directive.
- bpodgursky 6y agoThe Prime Directive prohibits contact with intelligent pre-warp civilizations. Starfleet colonized quite a few planets without existing intelligent life.
- gmuslera 6y agoConsidering recent events, I'm not so sure if there is intelligent life on Earth. We are ripe for being colonized by what would be the Starfleet of a different star system, even if they have a Prime Directive.
- WalterBright 6y agoStar Trek violated the Prime Directive in just about every episode. (They wouldn't have had any plots if they didn't.)
- benibela 6y agoAnd they discovered that Tardigrades are probably already everywhere, since they can travel through the mycelial network
- Traubenfuchs 6y agoIt's illogical to keep ecosystems alive that could potentially harm us and it's illogical not to spread ecosystems that are habitable for us.
- antonvs 6y agoDoes morality come into this?
- mlyle 6y agoTo the extent that we accidentally contaminate the moon -- with life, radioactive material, etc -- we screw up some of our ability to study the origins of life, the solar system, etc. And we don't materially seed the universe with more life in the process. But then again, astronauts have been there, and the practices that were used were not (could not be) completely sterile. Still, this is probably a bit worse.
- aeternum 6y agoThere 200+ moons in our solar system alone and an uncountable number outside it. Each second we delay space travel, millions of moons are consumed by black holes or obliterated by asteroid collisions. If humanity became space-fairing earlier, perhaps we could save some of them. We're probably committing more alien genocide by delaying space travel than we ever would through contamination.
- mlyle 6y agoI never said to delay space travel. But that doesn't mean "seed the moon with Tardigrades" either.
- aeternum 6y agoEnsuring that our spacecraft are 100% sterile costs significant money and time. Maybe there are some things we can do that provide high ROI, but my inclination is that building bases and having humans basically live on the moon is going to require giving up its sterility.
- mlyle 6y agoSure... AGAIN, the horse is already somewhat out of the barn on the Moon in particular (human spaceflight already went there, I think), but this tardigrade thing, in retrospect, was extremely stupid.
- noizejoy 6y ago> delaying space travel In the context of space and time in the universe delaying things by a century or two is like delaying something in our life by a blink of an eye.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jrochkind1 6y agoI'm honestly not sure. Why would it be?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- petre 6y agoBecause one could end up with invasive life brought from Earth, just like it happened with cats brought to isolated islands that had endemic species of birds with no predators.