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Russia's Mars Mission Raising Concerns
eldavojohn writes "Space.com has a blog on Russia's Phobos-Grunt project designed to explore the planet further. He voices concerns about part of this exploration that is dubbed LIFE (Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment) and backed by The Planetary Society that involves sending several samples of Earth's hardiest microbes to see if they can survive the round trip voyage. Space.com's correspondent Leonard David did some legwork to ensure that The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 was being upheld as it prevents cross-contamination between planets and receives some interesting responses from experts on this mission. The Phobos-Grunt mission will also deploy a Chinese sub-satellite 'Firefly-1,' which will attempt to figure out how water on Mars disappeared. Unfortunately, The United States is not taking part in Phobos-Grunt."
I say, cross-contaminate! Send a Noah's ark of bacteria and fungi to Mars, see what happens. At the very least it'd be fun to watch them die. Of course you'd also need to send microscopes along to observe them. But I think at least something will survive. "Life will find a way". -martas
weinersmith
The more I hear about Mars, the more the analogy between the 1400-1700s exploration of America seems fit.
Whereas previously it had seemed (at least within my worldview) that USA was the only entity even considering Martian missions. Now it seems that USA, China, Russia, the EU, and India are in the same sort of colonization race that England, Spain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands were in hundreds of year ago.
And what did that accomplish? Well, the host nations managed to spread their languages and gene pools to their "New World" destinations, but 300 years later the "mighty conquests" have all but melted into air as almost all of America's nations have attained independence.
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Unfortunately, The United States is not taking part in Phobos-Grunt.
Why is that unfortunate? We get all of the results with none of the investment. Sounds great to me if other nations and organizations want to make the commitments independent from the US while still sharing the results.
Developers: We can use your help.
the problem with being concerned with forward contamination is that you can't even step off into the bushes and take a shit. these are real issues, but until we actually go to some other worlds and kill them all off with smallpox blankets we can't really be sure who, if anyone, is actually in danger. the big question (other than, is there life out there not based on ours or that we are not based on) is whether life necessarily follows the same lines, or is different enough to where it won't matter.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Grunt" in Russian basically means "Soil".
Or, to use an English term that's more closely related, "ground".
Are we really able to put a person on the moon but not properly dispose of their waste?
Able is not the issue. We CAN do it. The issue is, will we given the cost? It's a lot cheaper to just eject waste, after all.
I'm not talking so much about the moon; if we took a life form there it would almost certainly die (then again, MIR fungus... but anyway.)
I'm talking about the Sci-Fi future of visiting other planets where there really is significant life. And again, there is the big question. We have seen (in the lab) that the basic building blocks of life as we know them are capable of self-assembly. So theoretically, given a sufficient quantity of primordial soup and the proper energy levels, life might be the natural conclusion given a sufficiently long time scale. We have a sample size of 1 solar system and just a small handful of celestial bodies that we've stuck a probe in. Of the bodies we can conceive of supporting life (besides Earth, Mars and Europa come immediately to mind) Earth is the only one we're in a position to know about so far. This is where I'm talking about stepping into the bushes (conspicuously absent on Earth's moon) to relieve oneself, which results in a massive release of bacteria which could potentially have adverse effects upon an alien world.
We won't know more about the numbers until our technology improves to the point that we can learn more about the universe around us. Right now, 'earthlike' means what? Within an order of magnitude of Earth's mass or something?
I'm not sure why you brought up smallpox blankets ... I thought those were things designed to destroy the populations of already known indigenous peoples? I think a better analogy would be the rats that were on board the ship from Europe that made it to the New World or maybe even the pigs that escaped and made short work of the squash/tuber/corn plant systems the Native Americans depended so heavily upon?
I brought it up because not all of the people giving out the blankets knew what they were doing.
In any case, we could step out onto the first alien world capable of supporting human life and potentially destroy it (at least, its ecosystem) with a sneeze, if the system at that point is fragile enough. Then you have the question of whether that is wrong or not, which we shouldn't go into now.
You seem to be resigned to the fact that we will destroy whatever we visit but I disagree.
Actually, I am open to other possibilities, including that it will destroy us, or that they will be stable enough to not be destroyed (as a world) just as ours appears to be - over long enough time scales.
Species can and will go extinct over time. Right now, things are just seriously out of whack (CO2, anyone?) to the point where it is unclear if the natural regulating mechanisms will be able to correct the problem without killing off more of the complex life forms on Earth than is usual. But it seems highly unlikely that anything Humans have done is actually a serious threat to life on Earth. On the other hand, everything more complex than a fungus could die...
Lastly, this outer space treaty was signed by many countries and for good reason: all the scientist thought it an absolute necessity.
This subject has been covered in some detail in Science Fiction. In particular one good example is Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. The basic argument on that planet is that if you allow human microbes to get out we will never know if life was there before we got there... versus the idea that Mars could be made more livable for humans, the extension of which argument is that things are special because someone is there to perceive them as special and understand their specialness, so terraforming is more important than science.
This argument is thus an interesting and relevant but essentially masturbatory exercise until we are actu
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Article IX
In the exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, States Parties to the Treaty shall be guided by the principle of co-operation and mutual assistance and shall conduct all their activities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, with due regard to the corresponding interests of all other States Parties to the Treaty. States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose.
The debate is already in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" novel : should we protect other planets from earth's lifeforms ? While it would be nice to find definite proofs in favor or against panspermia, I would tend to be in favor of as much contamination as possible, as early as possible. Terraformation will eventually be scheduled. The sooner we start, the better.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
some, like myself, believe that the first few set of ppl should be going on one way trips. To live there AT LEAST a decade. They should count on dying there. We would send supplies. If they survive, and we finally build a base there, then they can come back (why they would is another issue).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not to mention, it is already 95 percent carbon dioxide, so I don't imagine adding more would help heat the place up. It is cold because it is further from the sun, and because the planet doesn't have enough gravity to support a thicker atmosphere.
Maybe if our terraforming efforts included a way of doubling the planet's mass we might have a go at it. There's lots of useless asteroids floating around, right? ;)
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Perhaps the best way to do this is via one of two options:
1) Extract a chunk of rock from the surface of Mars and ship it back to earth - or maybe just back to the ISS. Replicate the exact atnospheric conditions on Mars - air composition, tempurature, etc - on this chunk of rock within a chamber in a lab. If the bacteria grows there, we can be reasonably certain the exact same would occour on Mars. The upside is this removes any risk of contamination on Mars, however, we cannot replicate the gravity on Mars, which would be a key factor at least for the amount of TIME something might or might not survive.
2) Run the experimant on Mars, but run it within a containment system of some sort - a case built around a patch of land. Then either release a chemical to kill the bacteria when the test is finished, or simply detonate an explosive. The downside is that the chemical might also spread into the soil and risks killing native martian bacteria nearby, and the explosive has its own obvious problems, also with risks much worse than simply contaminating the planet with terran bacteria.
Either way, there are other ways to run this test. None will be exactly the same as how the test would work on Mars itself, but it can give us a fairly certain idea while also posing a lesser risk to ay existing Martian life. Perhaps the best option is to run the test here on earth, as I described in option 1, then, if it does succeed wildly beyond our expectations, send another rover that can run it in a manner like the second scenario. Obviously, if it fails outright with replicated conditions here on earth, odds are so slim that the result would be different on Mars from the gravity alone that it's not worth running it on Mars. If the test shows some promise on earth - for example, the bacteria start to grow but then are crushed by the greater gravity - then running the test on Mars itself may become a risk worth taking.
Wouldn't that gravity well be better on the biology of those living there than the microgravity associated with smaller rocky bodies?
What evidence is there to support that hypothesis? Granted, it is not far fetched, but we don't actually KNOW what
level of gravity has what effects. My guess would be that some effects might be mitigated, maybe even completely, others
might not be significantly reduced at all.
Plus, wouldn't even a thin atmosphere be better for protection and help reduce the need for vacuum-proof structures than near-vacuum conditions?
No, because the atmosphere of Mars is already close enough to a vacuum that from a physiological standpoint the
difference is irrelevant. The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Mars is 6 millibars, 1/150th of the pressure at
the surface of the Earth. From a standpoint of engineering a structure or breathing, it is no better than a vacuum. Yet
from the standpoint of carrying dust into everything and possibly facilitating corrosion and other equipment damage it
could prove to be quite a serious problem. So, I would, as an engineer, MUCH rather deal with the problems of the Lunar
environment than the Martian environment, since I will avoid all of those problems.
Wouldn't Mars also be more desirable because it has mostly cleared the neighborhood of other heavenly objects such that the risk of one's home being smashed into by another particularly large rock is massively diminshed?
Exactly how often do you think main belt asteroids collide with each other? On average not often at all. In fact such
collisions probably only happen once in many millions of years, possibly billions of years. Those bodies which were in orbits which were likely to collide with things mostly did so billions of years ago and were either sent into orbits where they no longer hit other stuff or were pounded to bits long ago. The chances of an asteroid hitting Mars are actually probably at least as high as those of one asteroid hitting another. Besides, if you have the technology to live on an asteroid, you can probably shift its orbit by a few 100 meters if you ever need to...
Wouldn't the fact of working in an environment with an up, a down, and other gravity-based rules like that which we have on Earth be easier for workers who have to do things like maintenance, construction, and the like be better than attempting to work in microgravity where accidently losing a tool means that it's probably gone forever instead of being able to just bend down and pick it up off the ground?
Oh, it would probably be easier for you or me right now today, no doubt. However zero g assembly IN GENERAL should be
quite easy. No need for massive cranes, scaffolds, support structures, etc. I highly suspect that once we are even 1/8th
as knowledgeable about zero g construction as we are about 1 g construction today we will have a much easier time with it.
Wouldn't it be fairly practical to bore down into Mars to construct a habitat with significantly less materials (like basically a cap at the top of the bore hole) such that materials from Earth aren't depleted nearly as much for space?
And why wouldn't this solution work equally well when dealing with an asteroid? In fact it seems to me it would work much better and be much easier. You don't have to DIG anything, just dump a whole lot of material around your habitat if thats what you need to do. No need to worry about tunneling or weight, etc. It
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