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To Find Alien Life, We Might Have to Kill It
- illuminant 2y agoThis phraseology is the profane modern indignation. Beware what your own foolishness will program into to your minds. I have a bone to pick about those academic hacks and how their couched morality exercises corrupt our sensibilities. The train car and the hostages scenario. Now someone wants to train auto driving to choose fewer qualities in a death match? Morality is the imperative to permanently put an end to these hostage dilemma. Catch and demise whoever put you up to it. To fail gracefully is all our technology should be working out. To self district if necessary, safe fails is the science our generations should philosophize upon. Scenarios framing morality as lower point sacrifices are fraudulent. They do not exist in reality. They must be contrived, and the supremacy of will shall have whatever outcome the masterminds' intersection with chaotic reality produces. The prevailing side will call theirs necessary and move on. Precepts of law will have to be a separate thread.
- theGeatZhopa 2y agoIf it's really is about not harming "a single microbe", then the probes amd landers can't even land on the planet. they might squeeze an alien cat beneath the lander or burn everything with their thrusters. I can't imagine the scenery when you're an alien cat and you look up and out of nothing.. boing ... You're smashed. So if talking about the ethics, how the unintentional killing of possibly alien life is looked at? Intentional "for the science" is a little bit unethical, but we kill Gogols of Gogols at our place each second without even thinking of ethics. So, where's the difference to a possible microbean alien Life? And what will happen, if we suddenly really discover an alien cat? If it's smashed by the lander - is it ethical/unethical to take the probes of the alien hamburger? Is it ethical/unethical when the alien cat is not smashed, but caught. Just as a assumption, if there's a full grown alien cat pet keeper and you just smashed or caught and killed his pet? ..From the point of view of the pet keeper, is it ethical then? What if the pet keeper, unsuspiciously walking around, is suddenly smashed by the lander.. ethical? What about not smashing, but rather capturing?? I think there should just be a differentiation between fast reproduction and slow reproduction. We can't do anything about smashing or burning by the thrusters, but, if alien life is found, then its observed firstly for a period of time anyway. Here, in my thinking, the reproduction rate can be observed. If it's "fast" under some circumstances and if these circumstances are "often enough" to have constant "population", then ok - it's evolution. We can kill it for science. But, if the reproduction time is like of a Earth's whale or elephant, and even some social behavior can be observed, then highly problematic in my eyes. Ok. Say, we've discovered the alien cat. We don't kill it. We observe it until it die intentionally or unintentionally. Can we use the remainings? What, if there's a "mother" that grief? What if there's somehow a cult of living eating the dead and therefore no remains and no leftovers? This is a very shadowy part of science. At some point we need to do a killing. The most ethical one is smashing from above unintentionally.