I'm interested in ideas about the ethics of Mars colonization or settlement, and perhaps colonization of other objects int he solar system such as the moon. Do we have, as some argue (like Elon Musk), a moral obligation to colonize Mars in order to ensure the continuation of our species? Are there reasons we should not colonize Mars or other bodies in the solar system? I'm interested in the moral aspects of colonization and expansion into the solar system.
Dear John,
Probably we should go out into the solar system and search for possibilities. The ethics behind would be related in my opinion (among others) to 2 aspects as: who is meant to colonize these solar system bodies ? and on what conditions? E.g. voluntary groups of people with purpose to get the knowledge and understanding of various types of living on Mars etc. OR for e.g. excluded people from the Earth because of being the other or out of some established norms? Speaking about conditions I have in mind 2: living a new life on Mars OR exploitation the sources (as in Africa), what is possible too...
One of my concerns with this is that we will take the destruction we have done to our own planet to any other planet we decide to take over. Perhaps we should work on fixing our problems here before exporting them elsewhere.
Hi John,
It is a big issue and I think Kelly C. Smith Smith has written some nice pieces about it. See also the work of Mark Lupisella. I guess these would be a good start.
If I follow the ethics of organized complexity (my recent exploration of a "universal ethics"), I would say the answer tends to be yes, Mars colonization is ethical, as it increases complexity in the universe. With my colleague, we put forth 3 imperatives: preserve, augment and recursively promote complexity. Of course, there are many issues that need to be addressed such as:
- do we want quality or quantity of human lives? Probably -at least in the beginning- living on Mars would not be very comfy. So maybe we should invest efforts and money in making life better on Earth. This is related to the distribution of "goodness" (whatever you put as "goodness").
- the prime reason NOT to colonize is scientific. What if there is life on Mars? We don't want to destroy or contaminate such precious evidence! A course of action should thus be: send many scientific missions first, assess and study life there. If there is no life, go ahead. If there is life, preserve it (and go ahead if the complexity you intend to build is higher than what exists). Carl Sagan would disagree with that and say that Mars belongs to the martians.
The paper is:
Delahaye, J. P., and C. Vidal. 2018. “Universal Ethics: Organized Complexity as an Intrinsic Value.” In Evolution, Development and Complexity: Multiscale Evolutionary Models of Complex Adaptive Systems, edited by Georgi Yordanov Georgiev, Claudio Flores Martinez, Michael E. Price, and John M. Smart. Springer. doi:10.5281/zenodo.1172976. https://zenodo.org/record/1285656.
Best,
Clément.
John:
We have a lot of questions to answer before we can consider settlement of other worlds. For example, can humans thrive in hypogravity? Almost no work has been accomplished in this area.
It's also critical that we determine whether life exists on (or, more probably, in) Mars before we contaminate the planet, as we most surely will do by landing humans there. For one thing, if there's native life, we'll want to study it without sorting through Earth contamination. For another, we'll need to know if Mars life (and, for that matter, Mars dust) can harm humans or human cultivars.
Personally, I believe that we are getting ahead of ourselves. We have a world with more "land area" than Africa just four days away and we only just began exploring it ~50 years ago. It has abundant resources for establishing cislunar infrastructure that could make it that much easier to explore the rest of the Solar System. It's arguably a part of our planet - another continent. It is, of course, the Moon.
David
I do not see an ETHICAL problem. In terms of cosmic rays, and more as to getting there there is a HUGE challenge of getting there and keeping alive in transit. I.e. we do not have the means to shield astronauts for one year of transit to Mars, and keeping them shielded from Cosmic rays. i.e. it would be a suicide mission to attempt to get to Mars, and all that. No one has really faced up to the issue of the sheer lethality of space travel for one or more years, without Cosmic ray shielding. under existing technology, Musk Tesla enthusiasm discounted, it would be like having Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492 have their sailing ships go to Antartica. I.e. the engineering challenges are beyond belief and no one seems to get it as to how dangerous all this really is.
If it’s not inhabited then I think it’s ok to colonize it, although I think it’s very impossible to be achieved specially with the resources we have. I think humans can not live in another planet.
The technical challenges of colonisation of Mars are very high !
Another question linked to this one is : Can we exploit the natural ressources present on Mars ? Is it ethical ?
However, I think our society has to learn what has happened on earth before doing something else elsewhere. I mean, we are constructing societies more and more disconnected from nature (and so from our own human nature). Going exploiting Mars ressources is a step further on this way. But we don't know if this way has a "safe" issue for humanity. Maybe we are constructing now the reason of the extinction of life. And having all the space and the material we want will not keep our world (planet, solar system, univers) with its diversity and in fact its beauty.
Ethics is not a problem here on the planetary scale. On the human scale, there may be ethical concerns with how we design the stations, how do we process resources or threat people living there. What rights will they have, what restrictions can we put.
Colonisation of Mars seems to be ethical since there are no inhibitants in Mars. But it's unethical because large amounts of resources have to be utilised for the process where inhibitants of earth cannot afford. Hence it's unethical from the human race point of view.
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