number 2. Contamination !

2.    Contamination !

Manned space exploration has embraced the notion of studying the stars, moons, and planets with a ravenous desire to kill the subject, to catch, embalm, and dissect everything. To hunt and catalog without any reflection on the damages. 

Look at the way the moon has been treated by National Space Administrations. After the Apollo programs headed back to earth, the orbital craft was sent to the surface of the moon for what were called “intentional crashes.” The idea was to study the seismic data from the destruction. Fifty-four  space vehicles totaling almost 200,000 kilograms have been crashed on the moon.This shouldn’t pose a contamination problem for the earth’s moon, because it is assumed to be lifeless.

But Mars, on the other hand, has a much more disgraceful history. The 1976 Viking landers 1 and 2 may have detected life on the surface, but the results are disputed and not widely accepted. Today, over fifteen man-made spacecraft, probes, and testing platforms have been crashed onto the surface of an entire world.  Fifteen spacecraft carrying Earth-born microorganisms. This means that we are destroying our own ability to study life on Mars, which also means we could be following the path of Victorian germ warfare. But unlike the Victorians, NASA knows these facts and has decided to ignore or set aside their own guidelines. 

There are over 15 manmade objects on Mars with a mass of over 10,000 kilograms of toxins and contaminants. A gift from mankind. 

Additionally, it is impossible to completely sterilize spacecraft leaving Earth. When humans travel in those spacecraft, contamination is almost certain. Beyond contamination, ethical questions must also be considered about human intervention and research of potential alien life.

McKay

As we speak, humans plan on sending thermally tipped nuclear-powered torpedoes to Europa, one of the moons of Saturn. These torpedoes will penetrate the ice shell of pristine alien oceans to search for life and kill it, either directly or incidentally.

Robotic spacecraft to Mars are required to be sterilized, to have at most 300,000 spores on the exterior of the craft—and more thoroughly sterilized if they contact "special regions" containing water, as otherwise there is a risk of contaminating not only the life-detection experiments but possibly the planet itself.

We do not know enough about what life is, what life could be on other worlds, to even consider these genocidal risks.  History has shown us that the introduction of germs/bacteria/viruses proved deadly to the indigenous populations of the Americas.  Or the reverse: in the classic book War of the Worlds,  Orson Welles describes how humans are saved because Martians don’t have immunity to our diseases. 

It is impossible to sterilize human missions to this level, as humans are host to typically a hundred trillion microorganisms of thousands of species of the human microbiome, and these cannot be removed while preserving the life of the human. Containment seems the only option, but it is a major challenge in the event of a hard landing (i.e. crash).[29] There have been several planetary workshops on this issue, but with no final guidelines for a way forward yet.[30] Human explorers would also be vulnerable to back contamination to Earth if they become carriers of microorganisms.[31]

This is not the path to discovery, but the path to colonization, genocide, and ecocide. A human path to freeing land of pesky indigenous life-forms, regardless of whether we acknowledge them or their right to existence.  

This is the study of what you are destroying by studying it