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> Mars is disconnected from Earth's biosphere. To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and b

by fathyb 4y ago

> Mars is disconnected from Earth's biosphere. To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs. I'm sure colons back in the day thought something similar about "the new world". There are so many questions we need to answer first. How are we going to terraform Mars? What kind of technology are we going to use to change the thermo-chemical properties of an entire planet? What impact is it going to have with its magnetic fields, its gravity, and its orbit? How are humans going to evolve to live there? Slight endocrine disruptors are making people infertile, what would living in another planet cause? The solar system is an ecological system, just like Earth. Introducing massive changes like that is bound to come back to bite us. This kind of mindset in the past caused tremendous damages to our current ecosystem. Are we really ready to play god with the solar system?

didgetmaster 4y ago
Makes you wonder if some of those UFOs are aliens who are afraid that they will contaminate our planet if they make physical contact with us.
- fathyb 4y ago
  My head canon is that South Park episode [0] were they find out our planet is actually an alien reality show: > A few billion years ago we realized, "what if we took species from all different planets in the universe, and put them together, on the same planet?" Great TV, right? Asians, bears, ducks, Jews, deer, and Hispanics, all trying to live side by side on one planet! It's great! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancelled_(South_Park) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancelled_(South_Park)
danw1979 4y ago
I’m on the fence about astrobiology, but I’ll go out on a limb and say the solar system is not a connected ecosystem “like Earth”. Any actions we take that ruin parts of the quite likely ecosystem that lives on Mars will have zero effect on Earth’s. I think a more likely threat is that we may bring something nasty back with a human mission to Mars, as unlike a sample return, you can’t keep the crew and every part of the returning spacecraft in a NASA biocontainment lab indefinitely.

by fathyb 4y ago

didgetmaster 4y ago

Makes you wonder if some of those UFOs are aliens who are afraid that they will contaminate our planet if they make physical contact with us.

fathyb 4y ago
My head canon is that South Park episode [0] were they find out our planet is actually an alien reality show: > A few billion years ago we realized, "what if we took species from all different planets in the universe, and put them together, on the same planet?" Great TV, right? Asians, bears, ducks, Jews, deer, and Hispanics, all trying to live side by side on one planet! It's great! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancelled_(South_Park) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancelled_(South_Park)

danw1979 4y ago

I’m on the fence about astrobiology, but I’ll go out on a limb and say the solar system is not a connected ecosystem “like Earth”. Any actions we take that ruin parts of the quite likely ecosystem that lives on Mars will have zero effect on Earth’s. I think a more likely threat is that we may bring something nasty back with a human mission to Mars, as unlike a sample return, you can’t keep the crew and every part of the returning spacecraft in a NASA biocontainment lab indefinitely.