Focus Question: Considering the Costs and the Benefits, Is Space Exploration Worth the Risks?

Focus Question: Considering the costs and the benefits, is space exploration worth the risks?

Science Investigation

Unit: Science and Society-Astronomy

Name:______

Class Period/Block:______

Date:______

1. Preview

1. What did you notice that you didn’t expect?

1. What can you learn from examining this?

1. What do you wonder about…who?

1. Investigation

Report Findings (Thesis)

Formulate a thesis to answer the focus question.

• Does it make sense? Is it clear and concise?
• Is it specific to the topic?
• Does it clearly state exactly what I talk about in the paper?

1. Report Findings (Essay)

• Writing to Inform-answering the question and citing ideas and information from the documents clearly and accurately.
• Writing arguments-to support a claim/thesis based on the analysis and citation of the documents.

Writing tips:

• Use thesis to guide your writing
• Cite at least 1-3 examples from all sources
• Use appropriate language and punctuation

Sources

Would It Be Ethical To Colonize Mars?

SEP 30, 2015 @ 01:49 PM 7,734 VIEWS

Janet D. Stemwedel

This undated photo provided by NASA and taken by an instrument aboard the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks on the surface of Mars that scientists believe were caused by flowing streams of salty water. Researchers said Monday, Sept. 28, 2015, that the latest observations strongly support the longtime theory that salt water in liquid form flows down certain Martian slopes each summer. (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona via AP)

With the recent discovery of flowing liquid water on Mars , talk has turned to what it would take to colonize Mars. But before you pack your bags, it’s worth thinking about whether we should colonize Mars.

Here I am not arguing for a definitive answer to that question. Rather, I consider some of the ethical implications of a human outpost on the red planet, implications whose contemplation should be central to our space strategy rather than an afterthought.

Potential harm to Martian life forms.

Probably the strongest ethical argument against colonizing Mars would be if such colonization had the potential to harm any indigenous life forms that might be on Mars. Of course, we are not aware of any such life forms at the moment. The discovery of liquid water (and indications that the Martian surface may once have had much more of it) raises the possibility that there might have been life on Mars in the past. Life forms that once were, but are no longer, are probably immune to harmful impacts from Earthling settlement on Mars.

But what about indigenous life forms that haven’t happened yet? What if there are processes happening right now through which life on Mars could emerge? If Earthling settlement would disrupt these processes, is that a harm we ought to avoid? More generally, do we have ethical obligations to potential life forms?

This question gets into ethical territory that is contentious among Earthlings, who don’t always agree about our obligations to potential humans on a timescale of nine months or of several generations. I’m not sure the ethical disagreements get any clearer just because we have them on a different planet.

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And even if moral intuitions were clear and uniform, here’s another challenge: What is the moral status of life forms different enough from the ones we have on Earth that we might fail to recognize them as “life” in the first place? In the interests of extreme galactic biodiversity, would there be on obligation not to harm anything that might be alive (and to assume that our methods for assessing what’s alive in our early encounters with Martian life are likely to give false negatives)? Does our sense of moral community only extend to life forms that sufficiently resemble Earth life forms? Would we recognize exotic Martian life forms as alive if they had the weaponry to make us?

Potential harmful impacts on Earth.

Even if Mars is a lifeless planet, whether it’s ethical to colonize Mars may depend on what kinds of consequences the mission has here on Earth. The machinery of space travel uses natural resources. It generates waste products. It shifts funds away from other projects or purposes.

The ethical issue here is not just the magnitude of the costs of a colonization mission relative to the benefits of establishing a Mars colony. It’s also a matter of how those costs and benefits are distributed — of whether the people who bear the costs will also enjoy the benefits.

Indeed, the social impacts of colonizing Mars may provide the most difficult ethical terrain. If a Mars colony holds the promise of a new start, an escape from messes we have created on our home planet, we need to consider the fairness of who gets to escape and who is left behind to deal with the mess. Even years prior to any realistic hope of a crewed mission to Mars, we might weigh the impacts of shifting scientific and engineering brainpower to this challenge — and away from addressing other human aspirations and needs, some of them quite pressing.

At the very least, we should think through the ethical implications of a project likely to benefit few people directly. Will it help Earthbound humans to address disease, climate change, war, social and economic inequality? Will it undercut efforts to address these issues?

Potential harmful impacts on the solar system.

Any mission of colonization from Earth to Mars takes for granted the larger environment of the solar system in which both planets maintain orbits. If the mission generates enough space junk to make future space travel hazardous, or involves engineering projects on Mars that end up disrupting the gravitational balance between heavenly bodies, that could be bad, both for the colonists and for folks back on Earth. It doesn’t strike me as a likely consequence, but someone should surely do the calculations on this before any major Martian infrastructure projects commence.

Impacts on the pristine Martian environment.

Let’s say even under our most expansive definition of “life” Mars turns out to be lifeless. Might we still have an obligation to preserve the pristine Martian environment?

Arguably, leaving the Martian environment in its current state might be of instrumental value (e.g., to scientists studying the natural geological history of the planet, or to sky-gazers). Surely, there would be something distasteful about marring the Martian landscape with a billboard visible from Earth. But is there more than instrumental value at stake here? If we have such an obligation, it strikes me as an extreme version of the position that we have ethical obligations to nature itself, regardless of its instrumental value to us. We usually think of nature as including various sorts of living things. Does a lifeless landscape have intrinsic value that places ethical obligations on us? Those who hold that it does should sharpen their argument while Mars is still pristine.

Should we assume that Mars is ours?

Even if we can work out the technical challenges around establishing a Mars colony, do we need it? What if some other inhabitants of the galaxy need Mars more (perhaps because their world has been destroyed) but we happened to get there first. Would we have an obligation to help them out by sharing Mars, or by ceding it to them and going back to Earth? Should we be thinking of Mars as a shared resource?

Who else do we imagine might need it, and for what? Maybe the real reason to protect the pristine Martian environment is in order to cultivate restraint in ourselves, rather than feeding our rapacious appetite for conquest.

Just because we have the technical capacity to do something doesn’t mean that weshould do it. Sending a crewed mission or human colonists to Mars is an expensive and risky undertaking if the goal just amounts to having Mars for our own.

Why is Pluto no longer a planet?

By Library of Congress, "Everyday Mysteries"

Why is Pluto no longer a planet?

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto to that of a dwarf planet because it did not meet the three criteria the IAU uses to define a full-sized planet. Essentially Pluto meets all the criteria except one- it “has not cleared its neighboring region of other objects.”

In August 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) downgraded the status of Pluto to that of "dwarf planet." This means that from now on only the rocky worlds of the inner Solar System and the gas giants of the outer system will be designated as planets. The “inner Solar System” is the region of space that is smaller than the radius of Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. It contains the asteroid belt as well as the terrestrial planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The “gas giants” of course are Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus. So now we have eight planets instead of the nine we used to have.

What is a Dwarf Planet?

A “dwarf planet,” as defined by the IAU, is a celestial body in direct orbit of the Sun that is massive enough that its shape is controlled by gravitational forces rather than mechanical forces (and is thus ellipsoid in shape), but has not cleared its neighboring region of other objects.

So, the three criteria of the IAU for a full-sized planet are:

1. It is in orbit around the Sun.
2. It has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape).
3. It has "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit.

Pluto meets only two of these criteria, losing out on the third. In all the billions of years it has lived there, it has not managed to clear its neighborhood. You may wonder what that means, “not clearing its neighboring region of other objects?” Sounds like a minesweeper in space! This means that the planet has become gravitationally dominant -- there are no other bodies of comparable size other than its own satellites or those otherwise under its gravitational influence, in its vicinity in space.

So any large body that does not meet these criteria is now classed as a “dwarf planet,” and that includes Pluto, which shares its orbital neighborhood with Kuiper belt objects such as the plutinos.

History of Pluto

The object formerly known as the planet Pluto was discovered on February 18, 1930 at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, by astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh, with contributions from William H. Pickering. This period in astronomy was one of intense planet hunting, and Pickering was a prolific planet predictor.

In 1906, Percival Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian who had founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1894, started an extensive project in search of a possible ninth planet, which he termed "Planet X." By 1909, Lowell and Pickering had suggested several possible celestial coordinates for such a planet. Lowell and his observatory conducted the search until his death in 1916, to no avail. Unknown to Lowell, on March 19, 1915, his observatory had captured two faint images of Pluto, but they were not recognized for what they were. Lowell was not the first to unknowingly photograph Pluto. There are sixteen known pre-discoveries, with the oldest being made by the Yerkes Observatory on August 20, 1909.

The search for Planet X did not resume until 1929, when the job was handed to Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year-old Kansan who had just arrived at the Lowell Observatory. Tombaugh's task was to systematically image the night sky in pairs of photographs taken two weeks apart, then examine each pair and determine whether any objects had shifted position. Using a machine called a blink comparator, he rapidly shifted back and forth between views of each of the plates to create the illusion of movement of any objects that had changed position or appearance between photographs. On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 23 and January 29 of that year. After the observatory obtained further confirmatory photographs, news of the discovery was telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory on March 13, 1930.