Slashdot Mirror
Our Man In Black
bot writes "A recent Slate article covers the onerous responsibilites of the Planetary Protection Officer. He is tasked with preventing contamination of earth by alien organisms, and 'forward contamination' (contamination of other planets with earth germs). There is also a published protocol (PDF link) for avoiding Martian bugs."
Criminals have already tried removing their fingerprints already.
The resulting lack of fingerprints and scaring is actually more distinctive than the criminals original fingerprints.
Philip
Signatures are broken
I think it'll be a bit hard to prevent when sending people. And no doubt there will be some jerks protesting a Mars landing on the infintesmal chance that there *might* be some particles of pre-animate matter laying around just waiting to get wiped out by human diseases.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Who knows, maybe life on Earth is the contamination from another planet.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I saw him not too long ago since he participated in the Mars Terraforming Debate in Mountain View CA covered on Slashdot. It's great to see that NASA not only has someone on the job, but they are participating in public conversations about these questions. Very smart, funny guy. This must be one of the coolest job titles on the planet.
This is #17 in The worst jobs in science list.
Something along the lines of "missed a step during Martian rock decontamination; 5 billion people dead" will probably get him a verbal warning at least.
Apart from the fact that the worst flu comes from birds (which are more closely related to dinosaurs than mammals), that is.
Your argument, while well formulated, is wrong - an organism isn't fundamentatlly better protected against microbes that are specific to their own species. The immune system is best at protecting against attacks from enemies it already knows from previous experience, it's as simple as that. That is why emerging diseases are so devastating.
It is true that eg. a virus is best at attacking certain hosts, but as we have seen many times in the past, they can evolve and jump to another species, and we know of no reson why a virus shouldn't be able to jump between widely seperated species. We simply don't know.
As for whether a Martian microbe would be able to get a foothold on Earth: there are places on Earth that might be favourable to it - a dry, cold valley on Antartica, for instance. Again, we simply have no knowledge about it. And while some - like the Bush administration - seem to be in favour of just rushing in and get stung, I personally think it is better to at least try to think a little ahead and avoid some of the most obvious risks.