https://www.scientificamerican.com/ article/could-planetary-

>>8909737
This sounds like political correctness on a planetary scale.

I'm pretty sure we contaminated the moon back in space travels youth yet nothing bad happened in the end.

If the bureaucratic wall really delays human exploration, I would implore people to take their own measures to explore the universe.

>>8909737
it's a non-article by someone who's LARPing
about a non-issue of something which isn't actually science

basically shit content by idiots for idiots, completely unrelated to science or math so please take it somewhere else

>>8909737
Just in case there is alien life we don't to destroy it by contaminating the environment and/or get a false positive on the existence of alien life.

>>8909823
is a false positive actually possible? we can trace viral outbreaks to parts of the earth with extreme specificity, surely we'd know alien life if we found it?

There will be protests, yes. On their own they wont be dangerous, but they will be used as political leverage to divert funding to other places.
But you never know how normalfag fads go. If it coincides with some hippie-like movement... it might actually shutdown space exploration, for the US/EU at least.

File: urban jungle Taipei.jpg (336KB, 1280x1024px) Image search: [Google]

336KB, 1280x1024px

>>8909737
How do you contaminate Mars from Earth due to meteorites? Am I missing something?

>>8909925

About 130 meteorites have been positively identified as being from Mars.

Not to mention, the Viking landers had no sterilisation whatsoever.

>>8909737
Planetary protection is important. We don't want to negatively effect a biome before it can be studied. That aside, dead worlds and characterized worlds should not be walled off because some Marxist douche thinks humanity should be stuck on Earth.

File: Steve Ballmer.jpg (32KB, 480x360px) Image search: [Google]

32KB, 480x360px

>>8910157
How does that happen? Do they fly to space from exploding volcanoes? Seems absurd.

>>8910969
They're from asteroid impacts on Mars that were powerful enough to eject rock from the Martian surface out into space

>>8910969
go look up the formation of the moon and blow your mind

>>8910372
If done in the right way, sure. I have a feeling protection evangelists are mostly hippy misanthropes.

>>8909900
Who knows, just be creative and imagine something since there is no past occurrences. Imagine, for instance, a very hostile environment where we land a slightly infected probe that proceeds to try to find alien life. It ends up finding some proteins of its own contaminant that were broken by the harsh environment and ended up in the instruments, since it's only proteins, we may never know if it came from earth or it was present there all along.

It's better to just avoid this.

>>8910372
Who are you to decide which world is dead and which isn't?
#savemars
#safespace
#makelovenotrockets

It's good science to try and avoid disturbing the system you are trying to observe (quantum mechanics notwithstanding)

I'm pretty sure this whole discussion has been hijacked though by hippies and pessimists who are just using the contamination angle as a scapegoat

>>8912175
microbiological pathology has reached a point where we can trace outbreaks to specific labs on specific dates. I'm pretty this is a non issue