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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."
Damn that Saxifrage Russell and his Greens!
davejenkins.com |
Crash spaceship sites should be designated 'national historal parks'.
As if we were planning on paving the whole planet as soon as we landed.
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
Someone is thinking ahead. For once. Refreshing to see.
There are, in fact, already treaties regarding space colonization. Just because it's not possible -yet- doesn't mean we should wait until it starts happening to consider how we want it to go.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
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.
Charles Cockell, of the British Antarctic Survey, works on microbes growing in the extreme polar conditions. If you have an access to Nature, check his latest paper treating of "Ecology: widespread colonization by polar hypoliths". There's a summary available from BioEd Online for those (prolly 99% of the crowd here) who can't access Nature.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Na they should be designated 'international historical parks' since any colonization on Mars would probably be by a multinational group.
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.
He should take solace in knowing that the massive amounts of radiation hitting the planet due to it having no atmosphere to speak of would likely burn out the eyes of the tourist.
These earth-like ideas of conservation don't map onto Mars and other planets *yet*. Roping off an area of Mars where the ships should not land!?! We're just starting to explore it. We don't yet know which areas are best to conserve and which are best to settle upon. Given that settlement could be an awfully boring and restrictive lifestyle, I'm sure that a lot will be conserved because of the harshness of the environment. Humans will have a hard-enough time preserving themselves in the Mars environment at first. I'm sure NASA's going to blow up a $25 mil. ship (or whatever amount of $) when they see it's accidentally heading for a conserved piece of land. I think these people's efforts would (in the meantime) be better applied here on earth. It's a novel idea for Mars but way too early. Let's not legislate Mars quite yet.
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.
So, America owns Mars now, right?
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..
Kim Stanley Robinson tackled many of these issues in his Mars Trilogy. I couldn't beleive it when I saw this headline, I'm certain some of the thoughts from that series has affected a great many Mars enthusiast...
We might have Reds vs. Greens before we even go there...
Does the Doom III ad have anything to do with the article, or is that just a coincidence?
'National Parks' ..
Who's nation though?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Never mind Mars.
The US *is currently* building a road in the Antarctic from their scientific base on the edge of the region too the Pole.
They are *mining snow to fill in crevases*.
The Man on Mars should be worried...
Brown said phase one of the project -- filling huge crevasses with ice on the crevasse fields 70 kilometers (40 miles) south of McMurdo station -- has already been completed.
Sir Edmund Hilary (the first man to climb Everest)has just walked part of it, and needless to say, has slammed the initiative.
http://www.antarcticconnection.com/antarctic/news
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
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.