Team:UNIK Copenhagen/Ethics

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Thoughts on Bioethics and Mars

Never return mission

Planetary protection treaty

The planetary protection treaty was established in 1956 by the Committee on Space Research. The aim of the treaty was to prevent forward and back contamination during a space mission. Forward contamination is the contamination of a celestial object by organisms from earth that may have contaminated the spacecraft on the way to the object. The slightly rarer case would be back contamination, which is the risk of bringing unknown lifeforms, if they do exist, back to earth. Both have quite alarming ethical implications.

Our project proposes bringing moss to Mars in order to terraform the martian environment and create components needed to create a sustainable environment on Mars. However we also have to consider the possibility that our moss could contaminate the martian environment, and perhaps destroy our search for viable biological specimens on Mars. Another question that we have asked is should Mars be terraformed: perhaps it should be kept as a national park, a unique red planet that should not be terraformed to be a second earth.

Medical complications

One of the ethical issues regarding space exploration that ties in with our project is medical research in outer space. Since we have little information about about the metabolic processes of the human body at zero gravity, we do not yet know fully how pharmaceuticals affect the human body in outer space. This means that pills that work well on earth may cause major problems for astronauts taking them under different conditions. The ethical question is whether we should use the few astronauts in space, for example the 6 astronauts at the international space station as “guinea pigs” in order to test the effect of different drugs at zero gravity. This “live” medical research could pose a number of problems. Is it ethical to give perfectly healthy astronauts medicine that for diseases that they do not have, and that could potentially have fatal side effects?

Then there is also the ethical question of the type of drugs that should be taken aboard the spaceship, or in our case: what kind of drugs should be given priority to be grown by moss? For example, do we have an ethical obligation to provide antidepressants to astronauts? Obviously astronauts are thoroughly vetted and go through a rigorous training process, however can we ever be 100% sure that circumstances will not cause the astronauts to crack under the pressure of outer space travel.

Who should own Mars?

Space exploration has a number of geopolitical implications as well, for example over the ownership of planets. Should ownership of a planet be determined on a “first come first served” basis or should a piece of Mars be given to each country on earth? Perhaps they are both an old fashioned way of thinking and Mars should be public property, not determined by any nationalistic sentiment. However which organisation should then be in charge of implementing rules and laws on Mars? Should it be the UN, the astronomical society or something else entirely? Such questions may sound unimportant now, but the time is fast approaching when they will be critical in determining our future as a two planet species.