The ethics of terraforming Mars

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars

Humans may be able to colonize Mars within the next 100 years. Or may even be forced to not long after that due to earthly pressures such as population growth, pollution, global climate change, etc.

With the colonization of Mars comes the ethical question of whether or not humans should deliberately change the climate and surface of Mars to make it more “livable” for us by pumping CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to raise the temperature, and growing plants to pump oxygen into the air.

All of this begs the question of whether or not this would be a good idea. We as people have taken our planet for granted, not caring how much we have polluted it, or changed the climate over the years. Would it be ethical to do the exact same thing to another one?

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for space colonization. In fact, hundreds or thousands of years into the future it may be a necessity. I’m just afraid we as people still won’t learn from our past mistakes by then. It wouldn't be ideal for humans to travel from world to world just to damage or destroy every planet we touch. What are your views on this?

Last edited by hester386 on 18 Apr 2009, 12:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

Space is infinite, therefor there are an infinite number of planets that we can colonize, totally screw over and then move on to the next.

Even if space is infinite (which is not known for certain) matter and energy are both finite.

The concept of trashing one planet and moving on to trash another is an immature idiocy with no sensible value. Humans have evolved on this planet and our physical structure and needs are intimately integrated into the structure it now possesses. It is obvious that the current structure is mutable by many factors, both from internal inexorable change (such as earthquakes), from change invoked by the presence of life systems (free oxygen is a major change caused by life) and by relatively random changes such as the impact of astronomic bodies. Humans have the unique capability to consciously effect some of these changes as the current global warming indicates. It also indicates that we, at present, are rather incapable of effectively controlling these changes to a practical degree. Before we start hubristically consider revamping planetary conditions of other astral bodies we need to consider how ineffectual we are in modifying and control our own planet which abounds in water we cannot economically utilize in making the major deserts bloom and in which we only feebly can modify our own behavior to even maintain beneficent current conditions.

THE JANITAUR

There came a time, at last, for the race of man
To pack itself into a huge tin can
And, puffing plasma, set out for the stars.
With a sidelong glance at Mars they fled
From off their planet, which they'd made dead.
For a million years they'd picnicked on those grounds,
Then left them, bleak with blacks and browns
Of ragged rocks and rotting wrecks of trees and stinks
And oozing slimes and burning fogs smoke out of chinks.
Off to find another place on which to plant the human race.
Three quarters of a century it took to far Centaurus.
A multitude of winking beer cans marked their daily trail,
And stubbed out butts and bottles; a cracked recording
Of the Anvil Chorus. They'd scribbled on the firmament
With several hundred million miles of toilet paper
In jagged lines across their spoor of ion vapour,
And tastefully distributed along their run
Were gobs of dog and cat s**t by the ton.
Four hundred trillion cockroach corpses
Tumbled in a cometary tail
To advertise man's glory
In departure from his sun.

On planet four, Centaurus Alpha, lived a race of crystals.
Pristine, cubic, pyramid, cylindrical, prismatic,
Airborne, groundbased, and aquatic. How they shone
And twinkled in the sun as they rolled across the stones
Of their tesselated highways, threaded
'Round their crystal flowers
Reflecting intersecting rays of light
Connecting glassy towers.
Catching, tossing, juggling light beams just for fun -
But then...their huge reflectors duly noted,
Since they had been vacuum coated,
The approaching garbage complex fleeing from Earth's sun.
Facets flashed with fright and horror
At this disgusting Earth explorer
Come to desecrate their purity,
Violate their clarity, security,
Rain detritus down on everyone.
So, with haste and hyperspacial radio
The crystals sent a frantic call to Scorpio,
To the Cosmic Cleaner Consultation Center
Complaining of the coming filth fomenter.
"Earth," they screamed, "has done a flit.
And now is wildly flinging s**t.
Frankly, we are in a snit.
By your oath, you must stop it!"

And the Center answered, "Cool it kid,
We'll make it quit."


In Scorpio there is a place between the stars,
Stuck out in space, a place with bars
Which tight entombs a monster out of death and doom.
When the center acted on the call to banish
Earth's star ship and make it vanish,
It initiated mechanisms to enforce the ostracism
By directing cataclysm of the very fabric
Of the geodesic of its trace.
One parsec tall colossal doors on this place
Parted to divide and free the thing they'd kept inside.
It took six months to open wide at speeds FTL
And wake the beast that snoozed inside this convoluted shell.
The Janitaur pricked up its ears,
Wiped sleep from off its sensors,
It yawned a yawn and belched a belch
That squelched three nearby suns
And turned then into meteors
The size of hot cross buns.

"Janitaur," the Center spoke to now evoke
An action in this thing it woke,
"You are assigned to launch yourself
And search and find, eliminate
A new distress. Sector five, quadrant eight
Is the place you must address.
A steel ship out of Sol contains
All that now remains of humanity.
And with pandemic, systematic
Quite erratic antisanity
They've trashed their Earth, despised its worth,
And now they've quit their native sun
To litter up another one.
So..sic 'em baby, bite their tails
And knock their blocks right off the rails!"

At this command, the Janitaur unrolled its lacy wings
Which spanned out to a million miles, composed of cosmic strings.
Its flashing eyes - two neutron stars,
Pulsed out with spinning beams
With evil glances, left and right, from out of horrid dreams.
Grinning wide gravitic tide, its mouth a large black hole,
Each wicked tooth, bereft of ruth, a pointed monopole.
On winds of stellar fields it soared in hyperspacial mode
And gathered speed in looping glides and gyrals, so it rode
Swooping down galactic spirals hewing to its plan
To intercept and countervail the garbage can of man.
It gobbled moons like salted nuts
And sailed through stellar clouds
As cosmic dust streamed off its wings
In trailing ragged shrouds.

At sector five, quadrant eight, the Janitaur soon sighted
Where Earth's ship had left its trail
And thoroughly had blighted
The calm sterility of space.
With its black hole, the Janitaur
Swept clean the dirty place.
But this act could not console
The fearful driving force
That held it to its destiny in its destructive role.
At once, the human ship appeared,
The monster twisted, swerved and veered
To watch in fascination
The Earth ship unfailingly perform its aberration.
Spewing out with gobbets, with gigatons of garbage:
Apple cores and orange peels and leaves of rotten cabbage,
Worn out scraps of rubber heels,
Corroded chunks of rusty steels,
Dented trays from TV meals
And mashed up cars with wiggly wheels.

It flapped its wings and moved in close.
So much garbage made it savage,
Lachrymose and bellicose.
Confused, bemused, enthused by so much mess
It all induced internal stress.
It curled, it twirled, it whirled, became delirious,
And swooped in flopping manic arcs
Exploding out in corruscate displays
Initiating strange atom decays.
Bright beams of ions, neutrons, quarks
Flashed and fizzled, squirting sparks.
The edge of its event horizon twitched.
The space around the Janitaur became bewitched
With garbage boundlessly enriched.
It rippled out gravitic tongues
To sweep debris at all degrees
And would have laughed if it had lungs.
But these wild enthusiasms
Convulsed in waves and jerks and spasms
Causing cracks, fissures, chasms
In its black collapsar core.
Into itself it deeply plunged
And was, peculiarly, expunged

From this known universe of time and space.
And so, garbage, all of it,
Dogshit, catshit, mainly bullshit,
As before, and ever more,
Was the savior of the human race.

Moving to another planet would only alleviate the problems if transport to another planet and setting up there took less resources than solving the problems on Earth. I don't think that will happen.

If you are talking about making sure some humans survive, I'm not sure we will ever screw up Earth thoroughly enough to kill all humans. I think 30% is a sadly realistic prospect, but even 90% is only a remote possibility. There would have to be a climate tipping point we don't know yet that recreates the conditions of the first of the mass extinctions.


Uncertain, and irrelevant if you can't travel faster than light, and accelerating expansion limits you to a finite number of planets. There is also the cost of getting whole populations from one planet to another, or to a different solar system, or even to a different galaxy. If we had control over that much energy and still trashed whole planets, we would deserve to die out.

If we had that much control of energy it would be cheaper and more practical to build space colonies in Earth orbit and perhaps colonies on the Moon where problems would be easier to handle. But there are huge areas right here on Earth that are uninhabitable because we have no cheap energy. The seas and the deserts are wide open to development with easy energy. There is a huge amount of energy in sunlight, in the molten core of Earth and in potential fusion processes but we are too dumb to use them.

Aside from all the cynics and skeptics, I think it would be just as possible as TV, radios, computers, cell phones, and everything else most people didn't dream of it....so it's possible.

I only wish I could live long enough to see that dream. It would obviously take hundreds if not thousands of years to get done on such a gigantic planet.

I don't see an ethical problem here, just an economic one. Resources exist and we use them, why does this use constitute a problem?

Through studying ice cores, geologists and earth scientists were able to measure CO2 levels and temperature going back 400,000 years. Currently, both the CO2 and temperature are higher right now than any other point in the past 400,000 years.

I’m not saying a doomsday scenario is imminent, I’m just saying that we are in uncharted territory and nobody knows for certain what will come of global climate change. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel like a lab rat waiting for whatever happens next. If the earth ends up becoming uninhabitable within thousands of years, I’m just asking whether or not we should do the same thing to Mars, or other astronomical bodies we may colonize?

i wonder what kindof government they would set up on mars

Not to worry. Probably all planets aside from Earth are already pretty much uninhabitable. No need to bother our little heads. Nature has done the job for us.

I don't see this as an ethical problem at all. I mean, for one, it isn't wrong to make Earth uninhabitable, secondly Mars ALREADY IS uninhabitable, so I really don't see the problem there.

I'm not sure where you live nor how you rate right and wrong but I am, to say the least, just a mite uneasy about people who act to destroy all life on Earth as we know it.

Well, the problem is that we currently do not have other alternatives, plus making a planet uninhabitable causes large scale property issues, as the destruction is a large negative externality. This does not mean that making a planet uninhabitable is necessarily wrong, so your "unease" just seems an emotional reaction, as there is no other reason to have problems that I see.

I agree with this 100%. I guess I’m just hoping we as people aren’t really this ignorant or else we really do deserve whatever fate awaits us.