You had me at weird cheeses. On a serious note, that was a great article. One of my biggest worries with the prospect of humanity exploring the rest of the galaxy and the universe is that we will accidentally destroy something that we didn't even know was there. We are looking for things like those on Earth, but those things evolved on Earth. We may not even recognize life or its signs when we see it (from afar). I can see this devolving in an industrious resource grab, but I have hope that we may learn from the colonization of "the New World" and our behavior as a whole during that time. I really hope we approach this in the right way. I may not live to see it, but it's about to be an (even more) exciting time to be alive.
I can definitely agree with you about humanity's expansion becoming a resource grab, but it could also be that we become the resources for a more advanced civilisation. Either way it's gonna be pretty tricky to get right.
Also, I love aeon.co -I follow that URL. on Hubski.On Earth, scientists have managed to revive bacteria that has been frozen in ice sheets or entombed in salt crystals for millions of years. So it’s possible that extinct Martians aren’t extinct at all. Warm up Mars, McKay reasons, and the red planet might just spring back to life. But that won’t happen without Earth’s intervention. As McKay put it to me: ‘We should say: “We can help you. We’ll bring back the water, we’ll make it warm again, and you can flourish.”’
Whenever I do the simplest of tasks I like to ask myself, "what are the unintended consequences of my actions?" -Seems like a good rule of thumb here, FOR SURE.
I could have sworn that the reason Mars is dead is because its core is no longer molten. As a result, it has no magnetic field to keep its atmosphere from being blown away by solar wind. If that's the case, warming it up would be a pretty difficult feat to pull off. As for thinking about the consequences of our actions, I agree that when it comes to the grand scheme of things it's a pretty important safety. I'm sure though that we've had more scientific breakthroughs than we can even figure all because someone said "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I pull this off."
That was a good read. If we were to make a code of ethics, we'd have to make sure to enforce it. I could see this becoming something people look at and say "oh that's cute" while they exploit a planet. And also I hope, if a sentient alien species does find us, that they worry about ethics too.
The same was probably hoped for intercontinental naval travel.
Sure. However, interstellar travel is a completely different scale. Unless some species stumbles on some kind of holy grail of technology that makes it ridiculously easy, the amount of effort, time, and resources required to achieve such a feat in and of itself is probably a sign of social maturity.