Ethics and the Potential Conflicts between Astrobiology, Planetary Protection, and Commercial Use of Space

Abstract

A high standard of planetary protection is important for astrobiology, though the risk for contamination can never be zero. It is therefore important to find a balance. If extraterrestrial life has a moral standing in its own right, it will also affect what we have to do to protect it. The questions of how far we need to go to protect extraterrestrial life will be even more acute and complicated when the time comes to use habitable worlds for commercial purposes. There will also be conflicts between those who want to set a world aside for more research and those who want to give the green light for development. I believe it is important to be proactive in relation to these issues. The aim of my project is therefore to identify, elucidate, and if possible, suggest solutions to potential conflicts between astrobiology, planetary protection, and commercial use of space. Project DescriptionThe project is a continuation of some of my previous work on ethical issues in connection with astrobiology, planetary protection, and commercial use of space.Planetary protection is a technical and legal term with a very specific content. It deals with how to avoid biological contamination of other worlds (forward contamination) and of Earth (back contamination), in connection with space exploration. In order to make the project manageable and in order to focus on problems that specifically occur in space (rather than on Earth), the project will focus exclusively on forward contamination. I will also limit my investigation to deal with planetary protection as a decision under uncertainty, that is, as long as we do not know whether a world is inhabited or not. This is a limitation that seems to be implied in discussions and decisions about planetary protection in the space community, even though it is not explicitly stated. Once we know that a world is or is not inhabited, the situation and the considerations that need to be made will be very different and it will make sense to start talking about "extraterrestrial environmental protection" rather than "planetary protection".Planetary protection in the form of avoiding forward contamination is very important for astrobiology. When sending unmanned as well as manned missions to other worlds, it is vital to avoid contamination of that world. It is therefore easy to believe that there are no conflicts between astrobiology and planetary protection. This is not necessarily true, however. We know that total sterilization of humans and machines is impossible. We can obviously never completely sterilize humans. If we did, the humans would die too. We can go a bit further with machines but, essentially, the same is true for them. The electronics in a rover is usually more sensitive than at least some Earth microbes. We also know now that what kills some bacteria will cause others to flourish. This means that we need to find a balance between our efforts to find life and our efforts to protect it.Another potential source of conflict between astrobiology and planetary protection ha...

Why planetary and exoplanetary protection differ: The case of long duration genesis missions to habitable but sterile M-dwarf oxygen planets

“…There is however a deeply rooted common-sense notion that humanity should protect life forms of a certain level of complexity, at least whenever possible. This notion withstands the Darwinian nihilist viewpoint [58], attributing instead value to life per se [59].…”

How Will the Emerging Plurality of Lives Change How We Conceive of and Relate to Life?

“…One of the most serious potential problems with new life, whether invented or discovered, is that it will become invasive or in other ways threaten existing biological life and ecosystems [37,77,[82][83][84]]. An immediate concern is the question of planetary protection [56,[85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95]. An example of this is the issue of quarantine for spacecraft to and from Mars [88,[96][97][98].…”

The need of an ethics of planetary sustainability

“…When we look for simple extraterrestrial life on Mars, how can we avoid finding only those microbes that we brought there from Earth? The ‘total sterilization of humans and machines is impossible’ (Persson 2017). With humans, this is obvious, because a total sterilization would cause our death.…”

“…‘The electronics in a rover is usually more sensitive than at least some Earth microbes. This means that we need to find a balance between our efforts to find life and our efforts to protect it’ (Persson 2017).…”