My own POV is derived from a context of "Why do people have a right to leave a footprint on the world at all?", given that the root of our moral queasiness seems to revolve around still considering ourselves to be "outsiders".
Life is a part of nature and it has expanded into and adapted to every niche it can occupy on Earth. Humans and their activities are part of that overall biological process, we are not extra-natural beings invading and leaving a mark on a universe where we don't belong. Whatever we've done either good or bad is still life being life, including engaging in its need to spread. We're natural, we're indigenous roleplayers in the recent past and future of this planet and its solar system, rather than illegal intruders to be excluded.
It apparently requires an intelligent mediator for multicellular organisms to escape from this gravity well which they're currently confined to (escape and survive, anyway). There's the possibility that Earth might be one of very few residences of complex life in the Milky Way
for this era of the cosmos -- perhaps the
only one with an intelligent species capable of space travel.
That in itself would seem to mandate at least colonizing the solar system with complex life / organizations before humans and their technological capacities go extinct. Our solar system is by and large dead; no microbes on Mars are going to be building civilizations and spaceships; and the frigid methane seas on Titan have not spawned a noticeable alternative biota after billions of years. Europa and any other moons and dwarf planets similar to it might remotely harbor multicellular life or develop it in response to a warming and expanding sun in the very distant future. But today their deep, frozen crusts protect any liquid oceans underneath from being casually contaminated by us.
To offer opinions on a trio of issues bandied about in regard to space colonization (fear of aborting alien life, economic concerns, fear of accelerating transhumanism and species divergence):
Mars already had its shot at developing its own life billions of years ago. It would ironically require the interference of terraforming to re-introduce those engendering conditions in the future, as well as providing an environment for any native, surviving microorganisms to ever evolve into something sophisticated. For ages Earth and Mars have exchanged material via very large meteor impacts. If any hitchhiking microorganisms survived those journeys, then the two planets mutually infected each other long before human space flight and potential colonization.
For it to be viable in the first place, mining of asteroids would largely be done by robots & artilect systems rather than populations of human space residents. It's difficult to see how this would increase unemployment on Earth since similar advanced machines there would alternatively be extracting what was left of the planet's resources, anyway.
The question of economic feasibility or the ability to afford space colonization seems to take care of itself. If newer technologies don't dramatically decrease the costs so that colonization can be financed, then it doesn't happen. Our predicting and decreeing in advance that it is impossible is not alone going to stop anything unless such becomes doctrine wielded by tyrannical power.
If successful extraterrestrial settlements require modifying colonists genetically and technologically so as to better survive in harsh environments, then this might arguably speed-up the species' transition into cyborgs and "homo exoticus". And that divergence of the colonists from Earthlings could cause the former to be deemed the first "space aliens", with whatever changes that might imply in terms of trans-world politics and relations. But such self-engineered evolution itself would still eventually occur, regardless of space colonization.
Aug 21, 2016 02:14 AM
