Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Propose 'National Parks' On Mars
colonist writes "Microbiologist Charles Cockell and astrobiologist Gerda Horneck want to turn seven areas on Mars into 'national parks', conserved in their pristine state. 'It is the right of every person to stand and stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface without having to endure the eyesore of pieces of crashed spacecraft scattered across the landscape,' they write. Cockell is not against colonization, though. He says that setting aside some areas for conservation would free up the rest of the planet for settlement."
pheww, I was worried it was gonna be a mob scene, but now I can rest easy, knowing that even after I get there, I can still go camping in the wilderness areas...
WTF IS THE POINT OF THIS!
get there first, make exisistence possible, wait until you reach a population of >50- then worry about running out of pristine areas.....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
shouldn't we go there first???
Until we can work out the value of an area (in terms of scientific benefits, mining, agriculture, etc...) we shouldn't go marking it off-limits.
Ideally these parks would have no value other than for eye candy.
Well, that would certainly put a crimp in any anyone's terra-forming plans...
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
It's an interesting dilemma. The only really good way to colonize Mars involves terraforming it. But the only way to preserve parts of the Martian surface precludes terraforming it. I guess you could build giant Martidomes to preserve the ancient landscape, but that seems like a lot of expense just to protect part of the planet from terraforming.
The question is - which makes more sense economically? Terraforming the entire planet, refusing to colonize it altogether, or building biodomes all over its surface? Right now, the third option is pretty much out of the question, so we have a long-term decision to make about whether Mars is more valuable as the red planet, or as a green one.
April Fool's day semiannual now? No, wait, that doesn't work out right either.
I think someone is conceptualizing Mars wrong. It's a whole PLANET. It costs billions of dollars to send a single probe. We aren't going to be littering it any time soon, nor are we going to land humans on it any time soon.
What we should worry about is not contaminating it with terrestrial microorganisms.
How can you have a national park without a nation?
Wouldn't the designation of 'parks' on Mars best be left up to the people settling there? Like, we think we know a little bit about what's there, but really we don't know much of anything. Mapping from space, and a few square miles of exploration doesn't mean we know squat about Mars.
:)
For example, what if we find a huge system of underground caves, like exist all over the Earth. Maybe they're too close to the surface to even put a city. That would be a better choice, rather than marking 1000 square miles saying "This is park."
Not that it really matters. We haven't sent person #1 there yet, much less colonists. Really, the rules will be established by whoever gets there first, and then be redefined by whoever takes power there first. If a country puts a big freakin' space gun on Mars, and starts shooting down other countries landers, that leaves that country in control to say what a park is. Or more like, if the colonists decide that they're independant (with the big freakin' space gun to prove it), they get to declare their parks.
That's what the U.S. did. They told England, "This is ours". It doesn't matter what they declared as what before the colonists came over, it's all been changed since then. The only big differences are the distance, and the space gun.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm not certain if current space treaties actually deal with colonization, but treaties regulating the currently impossible are always easy to support. These treaties will be ignored/rewritten when space colonization becomes a practical reality. And, as always, no entity has the means and authority to enforce these treaties.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
A national park must be owned by a nation... Solar park maybe?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
How about we actually get there and figure out what is there first. We could doom any colonization effort by declaring areas off limits that have resources we will need or want. Can see it now, from here we say leave these areas alone and unexplored. We find out after the colony dies that those areas contain most of the water and other resources needed by a colony. But no, we can't touch them because they are declared national parks.
Face it people, if there was not life on Mars before there is a very high probability that there is life there now. As careful as we try to be keeping the various probes clean before launching them there will be a varity of microbes, bacteria, and viruses that hitched a ride on the probes and probably survived both the trip and reentry. So colonization has begun on the microbial level at least.
Lets get there first and find out what is really there then we can set aside areas as national parks.
People throw around the concepts of 'rights' too easily. What religious or natural philosophy would include property rights on another planet? Such a bloated sense of importance and entitlement..
It is the right of every person to stand and stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface
Cool, so who's paying for my ticket? It IS my right to go there, after all...
You can't take the sky from me...
'National Parks' ..
Who's nation though?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Which nation exactly owns Mars?
Well, that's strange. Why makes something a national park if it's just going to be undewater after we terraform it?
Oooooohhhhh....
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Closer to home, imagine if we colonised the moon at some point in the future - would you send crews out to pick up the man-made "litter" left behind by, say, the Apollo 9 mission, or would you keep it as a[n] [inter]national monument to a piece of human history?
It'd be like trashing the Mayflower or something because it had served it's purpose and was cluttering up the landscape.
I say, the spacecraft and probes that land on Mars before the place was colonised would have historical significance.
I guess the folks proposing the conservation areas are just thinking a few dozen centuries ahead (a more power to them for trying to prevent a potential problem).
Though moderated as funny, you're more +4 wry.
It isn't that we're planning on paving the whole planet, it's that the planet doesn't have forests and such.
The result is that if you land one large spaceship it's visible a very, very, very long way.
The whiter a piece of paper is, the more you notice a single mark on it. The same is true of Mars. By the time there's significant colonization any talk of untouched wilderness will be pointless. It isn't like Yellowstone where you can find yourself a fairly tiny little nook in the forest and pretend there isn't a highway a half mile back.
The required size for an effective park on Mars is just too large for it to be practical, which is rather the opposite of your "joke".
Only the English love barren lifeless deserts and would want to preserve them in their pristine state.
Most people that live near or on a desert would rather change them into an oasis (or in this case terraform). Try living in, or travelling on one - it looses a great deal of it's romance very quickly.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Surely most interpretations of the space treaties would assume that the whole of mars has the equivalent of "national park" protection.
Is this "designating national-park zones" somehow equivalent to the "free-speech zones", i.e. confining to a small space what used to be available everywhere, so that areas outside the zone can be exploited?
Number two says, "There are no Nations anymore. There's only coporations." I suppose that means that the parks would be owned by MickeySoft, General Products and Lockheed Transnational. "Mars deserves a break today. No exploration will be allowed to interfere with our relative advantage over our fellow men."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Such people always have at their core a hatred for mankind and, thus, themselves. These are the people that wax poetic about beaver damns and the ecological changes they invoke and at the same time condemn man's works as destructive.
Mars is a planet that (arguably and maybe) once supported life and does so no longer (arguably and maybe). What cosmic plan does it disrupt to bring life back to that planet or bring life to it for the first time? And if he thinks that Mars' pristine wilderness is going to survive life's onslaught unchanged he is so wrong in a thousand ways!
We have earned the right to change Mars to suit ourselves and barren, lifeless vistas be damned! How did we earn it? By surviving, by achieving and by striving until we can leave our cradle and venture outward to other planets and beyond.
Wow, I thought he was dead, but he's not!. Can you point to the slam? The article you pointed to (my link works, yours had an extro /) was mostly positive about the road.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Maybe I'm off topic here.
/flame away
But I'm reading slashdot outside the U.S. and maybe the term 'National Park' sounds too local. I assume that not only americans will be able to visit it.
How about declaring a U.N. World Heritage site.
Otherwise its just death by a thousand cuts, just like good 'ol Earth.
Mars is already dead (with the possible exception of microbes).
Earth--with all its "mining", "exploitation" and "contamination"--is actually the one planet that's full of life.
I think it could be argued that most of "us" (in the global sense) have learned very few lessons...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I was always of the opinion while reading the Mars Trilogy that they would largely come to pass... and look at this... we haven't even landed any people there yet and we have the 'pristine vs teraform' argument going on.
:D
Excellent