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Raenir Salazar posted:Terraforming dead rocks side steps that issue. 
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Apr 14, 2023 17:08
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Haystack posted:Aurora is a pretty good hard sci-fi book that delves into a lot about the self-sustainability of a generation ship. It's also, coincidentally, very depressing! It also massively undercuts its own message when they find a way to super-speed back to earth. Like, if you can do that, turns out actually your extremely hard colonies may be sustainable! And your colony ship actually survived! Which suggests long term space habitation is feasible! I really disliked Aurora, I know the whole message of the book is "we only have one earth" but it went out of its way to be lovely about it.
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Apr 14, 2023 17:22
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Ecosystem design is a whole other set of problems that we really don't know how to solve. It would be extremely easy for a constructed eco-system to just collapse for any number of reasons. When that happens on earth there's outside organisms ready to move into the niches left, but on a generation ship? You're hosed. If nothing else it would give you something to do, much like interstellar colonization itself. As I kind of said earlier Gatts posted:The universe is full of space and dead planets, let’s bring life to it and make a few paradise. Decorate, spruce things up a little.
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Apr 14, 2023 17:22
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DrSunshine posted:Honestly I am really really leery about any kind of long-term Mars project. Like, this is an entire-rear end planet that's up till pretty recently, more or less untouched by Earth life - a planet that could, if not a possible source of a second biogenesis, possibly be (or formerly) host to an entirely separate lineage of life that split off from us at the prokaryote level. And largely it's unmapped at the micro level. If we go there assuming it's always been sterile, we might gently caress it up with our own biosphere, destroying evidence of an independent Martian genesis. In fact, we might have already even done that, despite the various measures that the Mars missions have taken over the past few decades. I'd rather that we at most put a bunch of scientists on it to do long-term studies and mapping. Don't worry, there's at least an entire International Committee Against Mars Sample Return that appears to be one guy flogging his book, with some famous cranks as "advisors". They've been at loggerheads with Zubrin over backwards contamination from Mars (not just forward contamination of Mars from Earth). On the other hand, I see that the Mars Society (who I have a dim view of for many reasons) at least nominally supports a mission to search for Martian life before landing humans for other purposes, which I suppose is some kind of progress (it appears to be a private mission in search of funding so no real worries as to it actually ever taking off).
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Apr 14, 2023 17:33
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Would not the precautions taken for the Moon samples also function for the Mars samples? If it was some kind of hyper-robust super-life that was ubiquitous and only kept in check by harsh martian environments, presumably it would have devoured Viking.
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Apr 14, 2023 17:35
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Coldbird posted:Earlier points got made about how interstellar travel can be viewed as a propulsion problem, but may be more usefully viewed as a medical problem; that's where my thinking has been for a long time. I mean, we have plenty of reason to pursue life extension research even if we have no interest in using it for space travel, and if large numbers of people can reliably live for 1000 years then the entire above equation starts to look radically different - and the timescales on which culture and the economy operate also radically shift. If we get to the point where we can build a space arc large and durable enough to hold a crew large enough to form a survivable colony and we have the resources to accelerate that to 0.03c then we would probably have a lot of other technologies so we wouldn't really have to. With life extension, hibernation, artificial wombs and a gene bank you could send a dozen people in a small craft that could go faster and get there sooner. Far fewer resources required and you avoid the risks of trying to maintain a biosphere in an enclosed space for a century+ and any potentially catastrophic social upheavals.
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Apr 14, 2023 17:45
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Owling Howl posted:If we get to the point where we can build a space arc large and durable enough to hold a crew large enough to form a survivable colony and we have the resources to accelerate that to 0.03c then we would probably have a lot of other technologies so we wouldn't really have to. If that's a little oogy, hit some humans with Soulkiller. Or frozen brains. A few frozen brains wouldn't be so bad mass-wise. This does presume full replacement cyborg bodies, of course, but we're already shading into sci-fi.
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Apr 14, 2023 17:53
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Haystack posted:Personally, I think of interstellar travel as an entropy problem. You're trying to get a very specific result over a very long time period while expending collosal amounts of free energy in a hostile environment that is simultaneously perfectly insulated, immensely cold, and constantly irradiated. Realizing this was my own inflection point in regards to the likelihood of interstellar travel. It's misguided to "inductively reason" human civilization will as a matter of course come up with working solutions to the myriad of technical, biological and societal obstacles involved in such undertakings when the systems required are many, many orders of magnitude ahead in necessary complexity and corresponding ruggedness than anything the species has devised. While the potential methodology is fun to contemplate, and the concept is not as implausible as say FTL for which we've got enough of the math solved to show it ain't so, if you don't handwave the difficulty it'd seem a civilization capable of achieving interstellar travel would be far different from our own - closer to Kardashev II than I - and consequently using earthly historical analogues as the framework to analyze their hypothetical goals and motivations seems awfully inadequate. Rather than assume most sufficiently advanced technological civilizations would seek to expand out of some mix of biological/societal pressures or as massive vanity projects, perhaps the answer to the Fermi Paradox is an inverse Dark Forest in which civilizations that fail to self-annihilate, be it through internecine strife or Malthusian collapse, inevitably achieve some sort of collective 'spiritual enlightenment' that leads them down a path of non-interference with the rest of the cosmos. I know it's far less exciting a narrative than painting the map your color, but in more immediately practical terms it might be the right track as far as SETI goes.
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Apr 14, 2023 19:28
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Im not sure why you're subtweeting me when you could just directly respond to me. But in any case no one, and especially not I, have said that we can assume it is a matter of course that we'll solve all of the various challenging hurdles that would face us in attempting to becoming an interstellar civilization. It is mainly a very useful assumption to make the various thought experiments we discuss in the thread work.
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Apr 14, 2023 20:40
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Anything much past manned habitats on Mars or the Moon (or I guess Mercury), or larger-scale space stations, starts to become science fiction so I figure you just want to clearly state your assumptions.
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Apr 14, 2023 21:10
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean you kinda answer the question, if we're able to colonize Mars then we will because we can. Like why build pyramids or coliseums when a hole in the ground will do for the former etc. The idea that a pyramid serves no function that a simple hole in the ground doesn't is only true if you're willing to completely ignore culture, politics, and economics, which is maybe not a great strategy when you're theorizing about what humanity will choose to do.
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Apr 14, 2023 21:45
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Sir Kodiak posted:The idea that a pyramid serves no function that a simple hole in the ground doesn't is only true if you're willing to completely ignore culture, politics, and economics, which is maybe not a great strategy when you're theorizing about what humanity will choose to do. Well yeah, that's actually the point I'm making. There's cultural, political, and economical context to decisions like to terraforming mars that goes beyond what seems like on paper the most efficacious.
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Apr 14, 2023 22:02
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Raenir Salazar posted:Well yeah, that's actually the point I'm making. There's cultural, political, and economical context to decisions like to terraforming mars that goes beyond what seems like on paper the most efficacious.
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Apr 14, 2023 22:09
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Nessus posted:This is pretty generic, so I guess the example here would be something like "in sixty years, schismatic Mormons funded by X Ae Musk's dogecoin riches use cheap orbital capacity to fly en mass to Mars; most of them die but a grim, marginal cavern settlement endures and receives support from Earth; over hundreds of years, New Kolob becomes autonomous enough to sustain itself even if public opinion of Mars becomes 'that's where those maniacs live and have child marriage'" -- this counts as "colonizing Mars," despite it obviously not being what I suppose we would hope to see in a future martian civilization. Isn't that just the Expanse?
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Apr 14, 2023 22:15
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Nessus posted:This is pretty generic, so I guess the example here would be something like "in sixty years, schismatic Mormons funded by X Ae Musk's dogecoin riches use cheap orbital capacity to fly en mass to Mars; most of them die but a grim, marginal cavern settlement endures and receives support from Earth; over hundreds of years, New Kolob becomes autonomous enough to sustain itself even if public opinion of Mars becomes 'that's where those maniacs live and have child marriage'" -- this counts as "colonizing Mars," despite it obviously not being what I suppose we would hope to see in a future martian civilization. I suppose, but I suspect Musk will be long dead and I generally believe that there wouldn't be an excessive death rate from Mars mission. More in context to what Dr Sunshine was asking though, about it maybe being a choice between mars or space Habs I'm inclined to say "both" but at different starting points and unclear who finishes first.
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Apr 14, 2023 22:24
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As far as space-related real science goes, what I'm most looking forward to is whether Gaia DR4 confirms wide-binary black holes are common. That'd be pretty exciting if so.
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Apr 14, 2023 22:25
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Raenir Salazar posted:Well yeah, that's actually the point I'm making. There's cultural, political, and economical context to decisions like to terraforming mars that goes beyond what seems like on paper the most efficacious. Okay, but none of those show up in your posts. What's the cultural, political, or economical benefit to colonizing Mars? Your argument was "we will because we can," which addresses none of those things. My point is that the pyramids weren't built because "we could."
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Apr 14, 2023 22:33
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Raenir Salazar posted:I suppose, but I suspect Musk will be long dead and I generally believe that there wouldn't be an excessive death rate from Mars mission. More in context to what Dr Sunshine was asking though, about it maybe being a choice between mars or space Habs I'm inclined to say "both" but at different starting points and unclear who finishes first. This does not necessarily represent Whig Progress of History so much as that on a long enough time frame, someone will do it. Sailing ships were good enough that if Columbus hadn't sailed west, eventually someone else would have done so, and would have started colonizing (in the Earth sense) or otherwise interacting with the New World. Is that right? Given the caveats I'd be inclined to agree with you, barring some discovery like "humans need exposure to some factor on Earth to reproduce which we never noticed because it's ubiquitious here, and also it can't be replicated or synthesized," although every caveat makes it more of a pain in the rear end.
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Apr 14, 2023 22:45
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Saying we will do things because we did other things seems fallacious in that it ignores all the things we could have done but choose not to do. If the existence of the pyramids supports the assertion that we will colonize Mars then the non-existence of anything doable but not realized is equally an argument against.
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Apr 14, 2023 22:59
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Owling Howl posted:Saying we will do things because we did other things seems fallacious in that it ignores all the things we could have done but choose not to do. If the existence of the pyramids supports the assertion that we will colonize Mars then the non-existence of anything doable but not realized is equally an argument against.
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Apr 14, 2023 23:04
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Nessus posted:Right, I mean more that - if I understand it - your position is that if human civilization on Earth doesn't collapse in a way that takes out our ability to launch rockets or otherwise get mass into space, then as long as the cost of doing so keeps coming down, someone will eventually go do make long term settlements in space - whether it's the psycho Mormons in my example or the Cascadian Democratic Furry Republic in the year 2750. I'd say that's definitely a part of my argument yeah. In terms of why, especially in a long enough view of history, for it to lean more likely than not. Not like gauranteed or anything, we'll all be dead long before some inflection point occurs. If we discover some special resource or severely shift economic incentives I'm inclined to believe the odds go significantly up; like for example, suppose we decide we want to get really gungho about reverse the damage of climate change; I think that's going to mean putting a stop to a substantial amount of mining operations terrestially; and with those sorts of economic incentives things that are merely borderline or previous uneconomical become economical and very profitable to those who have their foot in the door first very fast. Owling Howl posted:Saying we will do things because we did other things seems fallacious in that it ignores all the things we could have done but choose not to do. If the existence of the pyramids supports the assertion that we will colonize Mars then the non-existence of anything doable but not realized is equally an argument against. No one is saying this.
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Apr 14, 2023 23:04
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Right, and the odds go down in the event of something like "it turns out that human brain or motor development requires a 1G environment" turns out to be true. Things like that would not become apparent easily, because you can't ethically test for them, and the natural experiment would require humans living long enough to have children and raise them in a non-Earth environment.
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Apr 14, 2023 23:07
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Nessus posted:Right, and the odds go down in the event of something like "it turns out that human brain or motor development requires a 1G environment" turns out to be true. Things like that would not become apparent easily, because you can't ethically test for them, and the natural experiment would require humans living long enough to have children and raise them in a non-Earth environment. I mean, lets be honest here that (the potential risks to be clear) is not going to stop people from volunteering to go. If it does turn out that this is actually deadly long term; as a point of order doesn't preclude attempting instead to terraform Venus, because its gravity is much more similar (8.87ms to 9.807); and shifts the focus on spin gravity space habs that can perform a steady 1g; which to be clear was the context of Dr Sunshine's original query; ultimately that'd mean in the near term we'd focus on building space habs instead. But by the same token, maybe it just means we develop a human offshoot who are taller on average and people line up to date the future martian amazonians.
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Apr 14, 2023 23:24
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean, lets be honest here that (the potential risks to be clear) is not going to stop people from volunteering to go. If it does turn out that this is actually deadly long term; as a point of order doesn't preclude attempting instead to terraform Venus, because its gravity is much more similar (8.87ms to 9.807); and shifts the focus on spin gravity space habs that can perform a steady 1g; which to be clear was the context of Dr Sunshine's original query; ultimately that'd mean in the near term we'd focus on building space habs instead. It's the kind of thing you could learn about through research, but the main facility you'd need for the research is "a centrifugal facility in space," because you can't cancel out Earth's gravity from the surface of Earth. (If you could, you have overcome other, larger obstacles.) We don't know if centrifugal gravity would impact neuro development either (though we could get some idea pretty easy on Space Torus One, at the expense of some rats) -- it's not impossible you'll get some bizarre outcome like 'centrifugal pseudogravity .38g is fine, actual mars gravity is not' or whatever. These are all unknown unknowns, to borrow a phrase. What little I was able to read about after shitposting suggests that microgravity is bad for neuro-development in embryos of various animals, mostly in predictable ways - vestibular systems, optical nerves (which are apparently very sensitive in general) etc.
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Apr 14, 2023 23:37
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Nessus posted:I don't think it would be hard to get astronaut volunteers to go live on Mars, but most of these people are adults. Those adults that go probably will have children there that will be born there? I don't think we'll be mandating contraception after a certain point; we haven't spent decades arguing for the right to choose only to turn around and insist people only choose one option once it's no longer an issue of Mission importance. We do it seems have a small research centrifuge on the ISS, Japan has some sort of facility for mice (unclear to me if its on the ISS?); I believe Zubrin was pretty confident that 1g spin gravity in space was easily feasible, I don't think that's going to be as serious a concern if we can build spacecraft/stations capable of 1g spin gravity; if you're concerned the engineering challenges might be insurmountable. This is just one article about mice born in space but the claim is they were born healthy; there's some evidence of slightly more DNA damage to the mice's sperm in space (I assume they mean sperm that's fresh from the tap?) but it hasn't seemed to have affected the health of the mice? Maybe it could be like, outrageously deadly, but with just like the small amount of googling from a purely speculative standpoint like I dunno it doesn't seem like its something to worry too much about; maybe the effects are worse for humans or maybe it unlocks the X-gene; but it does seem like there's a lot of ongoing research and experimentation to study the effects of spaceflight on earthborn reproduction. Like hypothetically it seems like "maybe some damage to dna, but not a deadly or crippling amount" kinda seems like where I'd lean from this; and maybe there's therapies, drugs, genetic screening and so on that could be done to bridge the gap in safety; that ultimately it becomes within a reasonable statistical medical probability pretty safe with precautions.
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Apr 15, 2023 00:05
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Owling Howl posted:If we get to the point where we can build a space arc large and durable enough to hold a crew large enough to form a survivable colony and we have the resources to accelerate that to 0.03c then we would probably have a lot of other technologies so we wouldn't really have to. If we have the technology to create spacecraft with an expected operational lifetime measured in centuries or millennia, that has the near-perfect recycling technology to support a population for that long without a single stop or resupply… then what did we need to leave the solar system and find another planet for? Just take the engine off the colony ship and we’ve got a perfect space habitat. Mass produce those. Owling Howl posted:With life extension, hibernation, artificial wombs and a gene bank you could send a dozen people in a small craft that could go faster and get there sooner. Far fewer resources required and you avoid the risks of trying to maintain a biosphere in an enclosed space for a century+ and any potentially catastrophic social upheavals. For the former, I just don’t personally buy into the notion that we will ever solve the question of what constitutes consciousness nor will we develop true AI. I have no real backing to this, I just don’t think we’re equipped to do it, and the theory that our computers will do it themselves (like some singularity thing) always seem to be drawing from some questionable assumptions about how computers work and do what they do. For the latter, well, even if we suppose we do develop an AI genuinely capable of performing parenting well… I mean, that’s a really complex and difficult task, requiring either sapience or something incredibly close to it. If we have that, then why did the ship need to produce humans at all? What can they do at the destination that the ship itself can’t do faster and better without them?
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Apr 15, 2023 00:20
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Coldbird posted:Oh, I absolutely agree; the entire question of space expansion and colonization often ignores a huge and obvious point: the same technology that makes it possible, also makes it obsolete. Well for one thing, why should we as a species be satisfied to confine ourselves to just our solar system? If we have the technology and the resources; if there isn't a pressing need for space because we've mastered outerspace, people are going to want to see what's out there; perhaps persecuted minorities will want to start anew (or perhaps we become so authoritarian and cruel we pull a Starcraft); there's a large variety of potential socio-political contexts where just because certain material needs are met that every cultural, psychological, or emotional need is met; there's always going to be large amounts of people who are curious. But most importantly though, our sun has a finite lifespan, we could perhaps make a stellar engine that will prolong the life time of our sun by leeching some of its mass, and move our sun around the galaxy by nudging its own orbit; which might also help to take us out of certain dangers that can still wipe out billions of people even if spreadout across our solar system; like hypothetically if there was an alien civilization that still decided to push the expand button then they're absolutely a threat that staying in a single solar system still leaves us vulnerable. Because they're alien, we definitely can't assume anything about how our mindset might apply to them.
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Apr 15, 2023 00:56
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Raenir Salazar posted:This is just one article about mice born in space but the claim is they were born healthy; there's some evidence of slightly more DNA damage to the mice's sperm in space (I assume they mean sperm that's fresh from the tap?) but it hasn't seemed to have affected the health of the mice? I was going mostly off of this study: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/11/2/109 This study suggests that there are significant problems in microgravity for developing embryos past the cellular level. Fortunately, nobody is proposing we all go live full-time in microgravity for generations, but is it simply a matter of no gravity of consequence? Would the same happen to a fetus gestated under martian conditions? I imagine this is why official space missions will provide birth control. Ideologically committed colonies (whether committed to space settlement itself, or doing space settlement as part of another project) will probably have fewer such hang-ups.
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Apr 15, 2023 01:34
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Nessus posted:The problem is not the sperm, nor the egg, it is the environment of the embryo's development. Presumably there's a difference between 0.05g/near zero-g and 0.38g, but its also going to be pretty far out and once we have an outpost on Mars we'll probably see hundreds if not thousands of studies of Martian gravity on Earth animals; we'll have a lot of evidence to make an informed decision on whether to proceed with attempting to colonize Mars for human longer term habitation.
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Apr 15, 2023 01:49
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Raenir Salazar posted:Presumably there's a difference between 0.05g/near zero-g and 0.38g, but its also going to be pretty far out and once we have an outpost on Mars we'll probably see hundreds if not thousands of studies of Martian gravity on Earth animals; we'll have a lot of evidence to make an informed decision on whether to proceed with attempting to colonize Mars for human longer term habitation.
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Apr 15, 2023 01:53
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Nessus posted:I think it would be better to test this in a centrifuge in space first for animals, at least. If there's no problems with fish and lizards and mice and rats at .38g, then sure, throw the dice for a human. I mean its good to do both, since we're visiting Mars anyways regardless its status as a colonization candidate; presumably one of those groups of mice is going to be a control group. Maybe there's somehow a difference between spin gravity and martial gravity, do both! Additionally I wouldn't draw the line at no problems; some problems is going to be within a reasonable parameters; and might spur innovation in medical science to resolve those issues. We don't know how far medical science might further advance as well that might shift the risk calculus.
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Apr 15, 2023 01:59
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What kinda timeframe are you talking about here, fellow worker, I don't think we're gonna be putting live humans or animals on Mars in the next ten years without some new poo poo that isn't iterative on what we already see now. Unless there are some big plans I don't know about. Maybe if Elon's giant dildo turns out to work out for orbiting/visiting the Moon we can accelerate some timelines a little.
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Apr 15, 2023 02:17
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Nessus posted:What kinda timeframe are you talking about here, fellow worker, I don't think we're gonna be putting live humans or animals on Mars in the next ten years without some new poo poo that isn't iterative on what we already see now. Unless there are some big plans I don't know about. Maybe if Elon's giant dildo turns out to work out for orbiting/visiting the Moon we can accelerate some timelines a little. I've mentioned it before (and discussed it extensively so apologies but for further details I'd really just recommend buying his book, or looking at my previous posts in the thread; I answer a lot of questions regarding it) but hypothetically Zubrin's Mars Direct plan would have humans on Mars within a decade of starting it; using mostly off the shelf tech with minor further refinements of ruggedization. We broadly do not require vastly new tech just to get a small team to Mars. For the most part, if we're willing to throw money at the problem (around 60billion dollars, probably more in todays money, maybe closer 120bn$ pocket change for the US) a decade is a pretty reasonable timescale. But in any case, NASA was under Presidential Order under Trump to get Humans on Mars by 2033. Under Biden this seems to have been relaxed and moved back to 2040. So a mere two decades from now.  I'll take it.
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Apr 15, 2023 02:31
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Nessus posted:Would not the precautions taken for the Moon samples also function for the Mars samples? If it was some kind of hyper-robust super-life that was ubiquitous and only kept in check by harsh martian environments, presumably it would have devoured Viking. Not so much about returning samples to Earth, but I think most people's concern is more scientific. After Mars, maybe Venus, and possibly some gas giant moons, it's a long time until we'll have other places to look at with examples of how life does or doesn't evolve. If (big if) there is any life on Mars it either evolved separately from Earth, or we share a common starting point on one of the two planets. If we have a lot of human activity and contamination on Mars before we find anything it probably makes it a lot harder or even potentially impossible to determine where it came from, and when it got established on Mars.
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Apr 15, 2023 09:00
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Senor Tron posted:Not so much about returning samples to Earth, but I think most people's concern is more scientific. After Mars, maybe Venus, and possibly some gas giant moons, it's a long time until we'll have other places to look at with examples of how life does or doesn't evolve. Just, uh, let them vote
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Apr 15, 2023 09:14
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I think we'll have a long time to study Mars before contamination is that big of an issue; for comparison look at the efforts we take to studying Antarctica and avoiding contaminating it while having outposts there. If we're extremely generous and terraforming is something we can do within say, 100 years of first setting foot on Mars and it takes at a minimum 100 years to complete; if we haven't found anything about the origins of life by then it isn't unreasonable that scientists may decide to take the calculated risk that the scientific benefits of terraforming Mars possibly may outweigh waiting another 50 to 100 years to find those microbes. Or perhaps decide that the process of trying to warm Mars up might even make it easier to do that research. Like it's scientists who are likely making many of these decisions in consultation of many other scientists from other fields; if on the other hand we're finding microbes in every hole we dig that's probably going to be a huge focus until we learn more. There might be economic pressure to develop some production and processing facilities on Mars to make exploiting the asteroid belt easier, at some point the economic pressures are going to become a consideration in the scenario of a rapidly growing "space economy". Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Apr 15, 2023 |
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Apr 15, 2023 12:50
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Nessus posted:Would not the precautions taken for the Moon samples also function for the Mars samples? If it was some kind of hyper-robust super-life that was ubiquitous and only kept in check by harsh martian environments, presumably it would have devoured Viking. I'm not a history/Apollo mission buff so someone else can answer that but I'm reasonably sure that there was little expectation of finding life on the Moon compared to Mars and so I doubt many thought that stringent precautions would be needed. Similarly, I don't think the concern is about robust metal-devouring superlife on the Martian surface so much as resilient underground extremophiles that might interact with Earth life in unknown ways given the chance. Anyway, current NASA policy appears to be: Category I includes any mission to a target body, which is not of direct interest for understanding the process of chemical evolution or the origin of life. No protection of such bodies is warranted and no Planetary Protection requirements are imposed. As of 2020, this applies to most of the Moon, with a few Category II exceptions Category II includes all types of missions to those target bodies where there is significant interest relative to the process of chemical evolution and the origin of life, but where there is only a remote chance that contamination carried by a spacecraft could jeopardize future exploration. The requirements are only for simple documentation. This documentation includes a short Planetary Protection plan, which is required for these missions, primarily to outline intended or potential impact targets; brief pre-launch and post-launch analyses detailing impact strategies; and a post-encounter and end-of-mission report providing the location of inadvertent impact, if such an event occurs. This applies to: Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) that have scientific value in the study of the history of the solar system and of significant interest relative to the process of chemical evolution, as well as potential value for In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), and b. Apollo landing and other lunar historic sites, which have both historical and scientific value, specifically protecting studies of the biological materials left by the Apollo astronauts. I gather this also applied to pre-2020 moon missions. Category III and IV applied to pretty much all Mars orbiters and landers, respectively, tl;dr being minimize risk of contamination. Category V pertains to all missions for which the spacecraft, or a spacecraft component, returns to Earth. There's an Unrestricted subcategory for missions to places with no chance for life-as-we-know-it, which doesn't apply to Mars. For all other Category V missions, in a subcategory defined as "Restricted Earth Return," the highest degree of concern is expressed by requiring the absolute prohibition of destructive impact upon return; the need for containment throughout the return phase of all returning hardware, which directly contacted the target body or unsterilized material from the body; and the need for containment of any unsterilized samples collected and returned to Earth. Post-mission, there is a need to conduct timely analyses of the returned unsterilized samples, under strict containment, and using the most sensitive techniques. If any sign of the existence of a nonterrestrial replicating organism is found, the returned sample must remain contained unless treated by an effective sterilization procedure. Category V concerns are reflected in requirements that encompass those of Category IV plus a continuous monitoring of mission activities, studies, and research in sterilization procedures and containment techniques. - This applied to the Perseverance rover since it collected samples for future return Those policies are actually not as detailed or specific as I'd have thought but I'm sure NASA would (or already had to) generate hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation for a hypothetical crewed mission if it came to it.
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Apr 15, 2023 13:40
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Thanks for the information Exxon, it's really interesting to read. 
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Apr 15, 2023 13:43
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Raenir Salazar posted:If we're extremely generous and terraforming is something we can do within say, 100 years of first setting foot on Mars and it takes at a minimum 100 years to complete; if we haven't found anything about the origins of life by then it isn't unreasonable that scientists may decide to take the calculated risk that the scientific benefits of terraforming Mars possibly may outweigh waiting another 50 to 100 years to find those microbes. Or perhaps decide that the process of trying to warm Mars up might even make it easier to do that research. This is a fairly decent part of the political divisions in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars series. There's a group of militant "Reds" who oppose terraforming on ethical grounds and think that any human habitation should have as little impact on the planet as possible.
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Apr 15, 2023 14:25
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Raenir Salazar posted:I think we'll have a long time to study Mars before contamination is that big of an issue; for comparison look at the efforts we take to studying Antarctica and avoiding contaminating it while having outposts there. That's not really an apples-to-apples comparison there. Antarctica is part of our natural environment and has been part of it since the very beginning. It has fossils that show it once had a thriving jungle environment, with giant prehistoric penguins! Unless you meant the sampling of the ancient bacteria trapped in water reservoirs deep under the ice? At any rate, I would think that the requirements should be far more restrictive because we at least know that ancient Antarctic microbes have the same origin as other life on Earth. Mars is a different story. What if Martian microbes were really similar to ours? Any presence of Earth microbes at all would make it incredibly difficult to tell whether the microbes we discover on Mars were truly independently originated or were just Earth microbes transported to Mars. I think it's incredibly important to spend hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years studying Mars to see if there was an independent evolution of life there, because the answer to that has massive implications for the Fermi paradox. Even being generous about the supposed risks of not terraforming Mars, we have got enormous amounts of time to engage in that. It's not a matter of "we gotta terraform Mars in 100 years or else we go extinct", because for any class of conceivable existential risk on Earth, the task of terraforming Earth is many orders of magnitude easier than doing so on Mars.
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Apr 15, 2023 14:50
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