What Are We Protecting Mars From — And Why Do We Bother?

[Music] okay let me just say a few things about Mars and then we're gonna get going here when asked about my favorite science fiction film and I occasionally am I inevitably say War of the Worlds and I'm talking about the the first the first version not the Steven Spielberg remake as most of you know the premise is that the Martians right envious of all the water on earth hide themselves to our planet and begin doing what all aliens are want to do which is to say leveling Los Angeles this this clearly worthwhile endeavor is finally you can imagine what I say when I'm down in Glendale all right this clearly worthwhile endeavor is finally ended when the invaders get sick felled by bacteria so I've always found it somewhat ironic to note that if we do find the Martians they will be bacteria anyway and although it would have astounded Percival Lowell and I think just about any scientist of the 19th century despite 47 launches of hardware toward Mars not all of which made it by the way we still don't know if there are any Martians but there may be and so tonight's presentation about how to look for Martians without finding Earthlings is it's still relevant in fact maybe more relevant than ever in our eagerness to reckon or the red planet for residents how concerned should we be that we might contaminate the world with life transplanted from Earth that we might find life on Mars but it comes from Florida and not from the Mariner Valley well this is this a real concern or is it merely paranoid paranoia that's slowing down our efforts to get to Mars and find the biology tonight our two eminent speakers will address this question and spoiler alert they may not always agree with one another this will not be an infomercial I'm not quite sure what yes we will have time for audience questions I'll try and leave a lot of time for audience questions but that comes later so don't embarrass your significant other by blurting out questions during the presentation all right rather than prattle on any further let me introduce tonight's presenters and then each will spend no more than 10 minutes laying out their positions after which they can lay out one another all right John Romo will go first John Romo was a senior scientist with the SETI Institute he chairs the Institute scientists Advisory Board which is actually meeting today and tomorrow so he's a busy guy he's the former chair of Coe sparse panel on planetary protection and has previously worked at NASA headquarters as NASA senior scientists or astrobiology and as the planetary protection officer so the fact that no alien microbes have invaded earth and caused an end realm at a strange kind of event you can thank John for that there are many other things that you can what's the slogan yeah he accepts donations it's it would but what's their slogan all the planets all the time right and Bob Zubrin formerly a staff engineer at Lockheed Martin astronautics and Denver he's now president of his own company Pioneer astronautics yields master's degree in aeronautics and Astronautics and a doctorate in nuclear engineering from the University of Washington he's a fellow of the British interplanetary society many of the other members you know have springy balls on their heads and former chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Space Society and the founder of the Mars Society an international organization dedicated to furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars by both public and private means and he has authored seven books the first one being the case for Mars that was a ground setting book okay enough of me let's get on John's gonna make a ten-minute presentation Bob's gonna make a 10-minute presentation after which I'll throw out a few questions eventually you can throw out some questions and then you can throw out the speakers so when you point out that there's all those missions to Mars and we don't know what they're Martians yet I'll point out that there are even more missions to Venus but we do know that there are vague ins coincidence anyway the I have a great deal of respect for tonight's other speaker and some Yugo problems myself but the I do want to you know actually toast Bob for being here with apologies to William Shakespeare friends Californians Martians lend me your ears I come to belies uber and not to praise him the point of planetary protection is to keep the evil that men do from living after them be good it's oft interred within their bones some microbial paradise but that's not the purpose of Mars exploration so let it be here in Menlo Park the noble Zubrin has stated that civil servants are wasteful and that regulations are not necessary if so it's a grievous fault and grievously hath the new EPA answered it but Zubrin is an honorable man and there are others all honorable men who do not quite grasp the concept of stewardship but I speak not to disprove what Zubin spoke or will speak I'm here to speak well I do no thank you so we a tale of two planets here one of them dry cold dusty and then there's Mars I've been to too far in the Canadian North recently to actually appreciate the difference but Mars and the earth have the same amount of land area approximately and the earth is blessed with having all of the oceans too so it makes Earth a wonderful place surrounded by biology and it's very difficult to go to a place like Mars and discover life that you didn't bring with you because we're bathed in life all of us have more microbes on us that are probably evident in any amount of Martian dirt on the surface but what about the rest of Mars it's a real puzzle we're learning more about Mars but we don't know everything we want to know and I'll point out that we don't know a lot of things about everything and in fact some of the wisest Americans were actually completely against the idea that even things like meteorites existed Thomas Jefferson then prison in the United States was faced with a report the two Yale University professors had discovered a fall of meteorites of a connecticut of all places in december of all times and his reported response typical the prevailing notion was that he could even more easily believe the two yankee professors would lie then that rocks would fall from the sky yet they do fall from the sky and Thomas Jefferson was wrong we haven't been wrong about a lot of things at one point in time we had no idea that there was abundant life on the sea floor in the case of 1977 when the Galapagos rift expedition found out that not only were there deep sea hydrothermal vents or what they call Warm Springs at the bottom of the ocean but there was an amazing plethora of life forms that lived there on the microbes that were coming out and using the sulfide from the deep smokers to do that now note that vents glow at 350 degrees Celsius they're in the near-infrared an infrared in some places and in a different time I'll talk about how that can actually lead to life at the bottom of the ocean with microbes groveling for photons at the bottom in the ocean it's a safe place and they also have really amazing organisms like giant tubeworms etc this for a Europa discussion later on and we will put a Europa aside for the time being although it is the darling of Congressman Culbertson in a planned mission for the future of NASA so our knowledge dilemma what's the actual range and duration of conditions under which earth life can grow or survive what can they tolerate without disappearing as a problem for our scientific investigations and given that we keep learning more about life on Earth how do we ensure that other planets are not contaminated either protected you know it's amazing you go to almost any place on earth and you dig and you find organisms that are there that we wouldn't recognize as our brethren but they're there and they're related to us through DNA one of the things that we can tell if you can grow those organisms was very difficult because the once in the cold only reproduce maybe every a hundred years a very difficult thing to actually culture but they're there nonetheless and we can tell with molecular methods and there's an amazing revolution going on in the study of microbes with molecular methods right now it's as if we were wearing dark glasses that were black mostly and we took them off and all of a sudden we see that the earth has got probably a trillion species of microbe living here some of them live in deep-sea high thermal vents some of them live in hot water pools a recent discussion I had with some colleagues they suggested that you know we didn't have to worry about Mars because you could Paris there and the parents would die and I pointed out that if you put the parents in the Morning Glory spring in Yellowstone they'll die there - it doesn't mean Earth is uninhabitable but there are those who have the hutzpah to think that if they find DNA related organisms on Mars and there's no requirement that they have DNA that they can recognize them and say oh they're rooting closer to the branch of the tree because of course they got there a long time ago this is the evolution of trees in the molecular methods and all you need to know is that the one on the upper left is pretty sparse back in 1990 to 2002 the one at the bottoms got a lot of leaves some of which come in below the branches of 1990 and by the qualitative measures that people are proposing every additional branch on this tree below the initial branch should be a Martian but they're not the earth organisms we are pathetically ignorant about life on Earth we need to keep our conservative notions as a result of this ignorance cuz bar is an organization committee on space research that provides an international consensus standard for protecting other planets and that basically the concepts aren't hard I'll read the ones in red you can read the bureaucratese and worse International bureaucratese and blue avoid for contamination don't discover life we brought with us avoid backward contamination don't contaminate the earth and tailor the requirements by target location and mission type that's it that's the terrible planetary protection that we're here to discuss used to be called planetary quarantine and one of the things that it's meant to do is to keep organisms like kudzu from being brought back and covering things because it was not a pathogen it doesn't kill anything it just grows over it and as you see certain things that might have been beloved by ma and pas kettle disappear as a result what do we do for the kettle's build them a new cabin what do you do if what gets covered are important microbes to our environment and biosphere so you have to ask yourself the two questions you worry about the Outer Space Treaty which tells you basically avoid harmful contamination and avoid in adverse changes in the environment of the earth or do as Bart Simpson says science class should not end in tragedy I'm all for Bart all right so look at the future of Mars exploration for many especially popular notions and probably on the schedule that a NASA focused on the moon is in future of Mars explorations tourism and these are tourists on the front of a ship enjoying Glacier Bay in the last what we have in you and must ideas our tourist on Mars enjoying whatever it is you can enjoy on Mars and we don't really know what that is other than dust UV light and darkness on the same schedule that we have on earth but plus or minus 20 minutes I don't know what's in that big dome in the back it's all green and inviting looking I don't know whether or not you take a bus trip that goes out and shows you something cool in Valles Marineris I don't know whether or not you get into a hamster ball and you can roll them around the Martian surface I can tell you most of the people who can afford that trip don't want to get in 140 kilogram spacesuit and trudged around Mars so you have to worry about that but we have to worry about what we take with us before that because among other things people have planned for Mars including my Canadian neighbors to the north our greenhouses it would be a real tragedy if the reason you can't grow anything in the greenhouse on Mars is because of an organism that you brought with you that kills off your own plants and that could certainly happen if we're not careful many of the ideas about Mars exploration I originally came into with a series of books called the case for Mars the case from our studies were based on conferences and the third volume over there I have a paper with Lynn Harper on the case for a cellulose production on Mars which you could do with plants as long as you don't kill them off with the wrong kind of pathogenic microbes and we're talking earth organisms killing off earth organisms not a big problem but anyway I would highly recommend you look these volumes up and see where some of the inspiration came from Bob's great book the case for Mars so I'll leave it to you to consider those things as Bob gives his talk but the truth is out there let's not destroy the evidence before we get there thank you [Applause] alright well first of all I'd like to thank the SETI Institute for inviting me in for hosting this debate we need more debates in the space business because to a great extent a lot of things are set up and made into policy without proper thought or debate you know in 2004 we had a NASA Administrator who started a program to destroy the Hubble Space Telescope fortunately you stopped by Congress people you know two years ago the NASA was insisting that before we go to Mars we had to put an asteroid fragment into lunar orbit so we could visit it unlike the asteroid fragments that we can now visit in museums on earth one of which we could launch into Earth orbit and visit it there more conveniently the lunar orbit right now we have a lunar orbiting space station which is kind of like the asteroid retrieval mission without the asteroid these things are not being adequately debated but what we're going to do here tonight is we're going to debate the planetary protection program and John has just explained why he thinks we should have one and I'm now going to explain why I think we should not I'm going to explain why this program is irrational why it is doing immense damage to our current robotic exploration of Mars program that we have why it is irresponsible in terms of wastage of money and lots of it and finally well why it is threatening to destroy the human future in space and thereby also represents to the you threat to the human future itself so first of all why is this program crazy alright there's two aspects to the pronoun I'm going to exclude from my attack one function which is the sterilization of life detection experiments themselves okay the various experimental media in such devices you know the instruments that are inserted into those media they need to be sterilized that standard for any experiment that's what would happen if you're doing such an experiment on earth but in terms of protecting the planet in terms of sterilizing spacecraft in terms of adopting it as our mission to try to prevent the transfer of life between planets that this is what I'm attacking okay now there's two sides to the planetary protection argument one is preventing back contamination of the earth and this is the one that makes all the headlines okay us getting the Red Death from Mars okay and then there's the forward contamination of us and even the word contaminating Mars by bringing life to Mars okay one might call it fertilizing Mars one might call enlivening Mars okay but they use the term contamination for such a transfer okay that is the other side of it I'm going to address the back contamination first because this is the craziest one look we if if we could get the Red Death from Mars we already have because there are five hundred on average it's estimated 500 kilograms of Martian rocks landing on earth every year okay and they've been doing it for billions of years so that's billions of tons of Martian rocks and these things have been studied in particular the Allen Hills meteorite was such a - very extensive study as a result of the controversy surrounding it and one thing that was discovered as a result of those studies is large portions the Allen Hills meteorite Kate had never been raised above 40 centigrade during its entire career of ejection from Mars crews through space reentry and landing on earth which means that if there had been microbes in that material one it was on Mars they would have survived the trip that rock was never sterilized so the idea okay that we need to fear and impose severe limitations on missions like the Mars sample return mission to prevent the it from importing microbes from from Mars to earth is kind of like the customs department putting up search teams on the border to inspect the trunks of people's cars to make sure they're not bringing Canada geese across the border in their cars okay yeah yes you understand Canada geese could bring avian diseases into the United States and want to make sure people aren't driving them across the water meantime flocks in them are flying across the border all the time okay so this is crazy now of course though there is no red death in the Mars surface soil okay there are no microorganisms the Mars surface oil we in fact tested it with Viking yes but aside from that okay the Mars surface is bathed in ultraviolet light and hard radiation and it is loaded with percolates so you've got ultraviolet UV there's a tremendously sterilizing environment and furthermore if somehow there could be microbes in the Mars surface soil they couldn't be pathogens because there's no macro fauna or macro flora on Mars for them to have a life cycle a passage izing so it's not happening okay it's just not happening now there could be life in Mars probably is in my opinion that's an opinion I'll explain why I believe that but because there is probably a water table underground on Mars which is a habitable environment for microbes and you know what the original inhabitants of the earth anaerobic organisms that initially populated the surface of the earth the surface of the earth became inhospitable to them became unlivable for them once photosynthetic organisms started oxygenating the atmosphere okay what certain people who think that environments have to say the same would cause pollution other people would call it improvement but the but in any case for them it was pollution and they went underground to be safe from the oxygenated atmosphere and they've been there for three billion years you know they've seen the trial of whites come and go they've seen the dinosaurs come and go the mastodons the vert mock you know they all and the it doesn't matter to them now and humans will go extinct on the surface of the planet and they will still be there until the planet itself is destroyed by the expansion of the Sun okay now the same you know look we had microbes on the surface of the earth three and a half billion years ago when Mars had water on its surface okay and there was plenty of natural transfer of material between Earth and Mars at that time so that's why Mars life could have come to Earth from Mars life could have come to Mars from Earth okay if life never originated on Mars it would have been transferred to Mars at that time if from no other source than the earth and when the surface became inhospitable it could have retreated into the subsurface okay finding that life would be of some interest of course the opposite is possible or two independent origins are possible because one thing we know about life on Earth is that it appeared here virtually as soon as it could so which means that either life is an extremely probable phenomenon which happens in a geologic instant as soon as you have appropriate conditions and conditions on the early Earth and the early Mars were essentially similar okay the or life appeared here immediately because it was hanging out in space nearby in terms of particles that could have come from Mars or from interstellar space or who knows and immediately as soon as the place became hospitable to life it was infected but either way life could have appeared on Mars now the planetary protection program okay says okay the forward contamination they want to prevent the contamination of Mars from spacecraft and so for instance the Curiosity rover was prevented from going to an interesting site on the surface where there was at least evidence of a temporary water seep at the surface because of concerns of a planetary protection we're directing our spacecraft away from the most interesting areas because of this threat that we might contaminate the planet once again terrestrial material has been landing on Mars for four billion years okay we're just putting chains on ourselves the fault is not in Our Stars but in ourselves that we are made underlings okay and the but see I'm on the other side now the but look what planet do we know the most about the earth why because we were here okay it's very fortunate we did not have a planetary protection office in effect in the time of the origin of humankind and they kept us confined to the Kenyan Rift Valley so we would not contaminate the earth we would know a lot less about the earth had we been kept there okay but furthermore we will know much more about Mars when we go there if we want to find out anything interesting about Mars about Martian life the bet by far the best way is to send people there and to go to the place where the Martian life is most likely to be which is the groundwater set up drilling rigs reach it drill down reach up bring up samples and see what's in there okay and try to characterize it because okay you could find life microbes of the terrestrial sort with no more elementary representatives than we find on earth pay earth life is somewhat of a mystery and that we find no free living organism is simpler than bacteria this is what has led some theorists to postulate that life on Earth is an immigrant phenomenon okay could we find pree bacteria could we find a different origin you're not going to find this out without people tomorrow's now furthermore okay I'm told I'm running low on time Wow okay well just put it this way there we know human future on Mars unless the planetary protection program is shut down okay because you can't in other words there's no way you could guarantee to people that the spacecraft won't crash in which case there's biota from Earth scattered all over the landscape so nASA says that its goal it's telling the taxpayers that its goal is to send humans to Mars it has an office there whose mission is to prevent it from doing that that's unacceptable okay and furthermore you know if you extend this principle there basically is no human future in space basically humans will always be prevented from going to any place that humans might conceivably settle okay because of concern over planetary protection but what are we really doing we're protecting sterility okay you know people say we're protecting Mars by preventing it from becoming inhabited would we be protecting Earth by making it like Mars okay the a living planet is better than a dead planet a planet that is sporting new branches of human civilization it's not a Mars that has been damaged it's a Mars that has been radically improved and a human future in which human beings are going out to other worlds and creating new possibilities for new branches of human civilizations you know filled with you know new cultures new inventions new history waiting to be made this is the kind of future that that we need and this is the kind of future that we do not want aborted and that is why the planetary protection office needs to be shut down thank you [Applause] we had told Bob to try and be a little bit controversial but okay what's gonna happen here I'll fire a couple of questions to get these guys warmed up and then we'll go to your questions so let me start and John I guess I'll ask you first clearly Mars is a brutal world that's been described today by Bob so why all this concern about contaminating Mars I mean wouldn't wouldn't microbes even we brought them from Earth you know of course there's it's unavoidable that we would do that wouldn't they when they M quickly succumbed to the cold to the you know the dryness to the ultraviolet isn't it simply a giant autoclave that will sterilize earthly microbes as Bob maintains this could you turn this up a tad Thanks what's the autoclave afford to put Mars and I think it's probably too big I mean the bottom line is that the reason to not take contamination to Mars is so you don't end up studying the contamination and declare that Martians are there and have somebody use that as the basis for why we can't go back to Mars effectively if you're going to look for life on Mars all right so the issue you know it is basically preserving science opportunities including going to places that might be liquid water features on the surface etc you don't want to contaminate those and then come back later and discover hey look life on Mars is just like life from Florida in that great now it may be that life on Mars is just like life from Florida because we're all Martians in which case the earth has been overly contaminated for a long time and I wouldn't worry about the Canadian Geese but I would actually say that to falsely claim that you've discovered life on Mars could have all the consequences that Bob talked about from an overzealous planetary protection program in space and we want to avoid that now I will correct the record the reason that the Curiosity rover didn't go to something that looked like a recurring slope lineae first of all it wasn't confirmed recurring slope lineae and if it had been one of the things you would worry about would be traffic ability if there is a briny seep someplace and a lot of salt buildup the worried that you get is that your Rover is going to go in there and then break through a crust and roll over all the way down that hill so nobody wanted to divert from the actual mission that we were doing with curiosity and still are doing to go to a place that had perhaps I will overly criticize my NASA colleagues only soso evidence of liquid water as it turns out that most of the phenomena that we call recurring slope lineae are probably dry phenomenon in not liquid water phenomena at all so a bit John it suppose we sent the equivalent of you know a souped-up Viking Lander to Mars we just had it land in someplace that we thought you know this might be a good place to look for life it's bringing a load of microbes you get it sterilized to what one part in a thousand one part in 10,000 can you describe the soup that you're gonna use to grow these Martian well yeah I mean one of the problems yet is activating microorganisms is you can only cultivate less than 1% of what's out there no but but my question is slightly different and it was only to ask would it not be the case that those microbes on the outside and the inside of the spacecraft we send there would all expire quickly or in any case not go very far and consequently not present a problem for future exploration that's was okay so if you're talking about you know microbial survival all you need is a thin layer of dust to avoid most of the harmful effects of ultraviolet light although if you blow around you're probably going to avoid that thin layer of dust sticking on you so the distribution of microbes on Mars is something that we're less concerned about then something like the distribution of microbes in an ocean on Europa but you also have a situation where the spacecraft's number one place for microbes is inside the spacecraft not on the outside underneath the spacecraft there are areas that are permanently shadowed and never actually have UV that comes in there so it's a balance it's you know if we can put a rover down and we don't require to be fully sterilized it's because we realize that some of the microbes might get off but they've killed some of the other microbes are gonna be there all the time so we don't sterilize our spacecraft that go to Mars right now unless they're gonna try to grow microbes in which case we're worried that they'll grow the ones they brought with them okay Bob did you want to make some comment on yeah I do okay so look first of all this whole discussion presumes that the primary utility of Mars is to resolve this one scientific question of is there microbial life on Mars okay as opposed to being a new world for human development okay but if we do want to even address this question by far the most effective way is to send human explorers but even within the context of the existing program let-let's right now the dream of the Mars scientific community is the Mars sample return mission okay now Curiosity rover demonstrated a system that we can land one ton on Mars you can land one ton on Mars you couldn't land a fully fueled two-stage Mars ascent vehicle with re-entry capsule on top and an M er that is a spirited opportunity sized Rover that could go out wander around collect samples put them in the capsule and then the thing could be shot right back to earth do a direct entry at earth parachute down and pick it up in Utah okay we could do that sample return right now with the system we have but instead you have the planetary protection people saying no you must break the chain of contact with the surface and so now you must have a take off from the surface do an automatic automated rendezvous and dock in Mars orbit and then they want to take it back but using solar electric propulsion and no not reinter in landed earth and no not bring it to the space station because they might be contaminated with the Red Death okay no we want to bring it to a point in interplanetary space for astronauts sorting from the the deep-space Tollbooth orbiting the moon to go out and fetch it in the Orion capsule and bring it back to study there now this is what's called turning a mission into a vision okay the you know I mean really we could do this mission now if we want to do Mars sample return mission let's do it okay but we're being prevented from doing it by these absurd considerations and there's no end to this because what about contaminating the deep-space totals with the Red Death okay so there you go I mean you it's turning it into a simple mission into mission impossible and so there you have it we start we were studying the Mars sample return since 1980s and here it is this 30 years later and it's still nowhere okay they're sending a Rover to Mars to collect samples and the hope that if we collect it then someone will send a sample return mission there to pick it up right it's like a cargo cult thing okay but the fee I mean literally that's what it is but it's crazy now you have to understand something okay no one's gonna die from the Red Death but people do die from lack of money that could be spent on health care child vaccinations fire escape inspections body armor for the troops highway repairs I mean there's any number of valid things one could spend this money on instead of spending it on a space program that we are making ineffective because of basically the narcissistic demands of an office okay they know I mean if you can do a Mars sample return for two billion dollars instead of 20 billion dollars you're saving 18 billion dollars and if you make it cost twenty billion dollars instead of two billion dollars you're robbing eighteen billion dollars from the coffers of programs that could save Ewing in any number of ways now I happen to believe that you know human expansion of space it does cost money in these people say we want to spend the money on these other things you know it'd be more important than spending in on space they have an argument I think that it is worth the cost but it's only worth the cost that it needs to cost okay it is and this is also true by the way with the in spades with the human space flight program which what can one say you know it is doing things to spend money not spending money to do things and that fee fee but it is irresponsible to waste money over these concerns if you said to the medical research community we got five billion dollars you want to spend it on cancer research or on protecting the public from the Red Death from Mars what do you think the answer would be would there be any ones in other words our concern in the space community should be to do the exploration okay if you were to say our concern is protecting the public for Martian diseases you should give that money to Center for Disease Control and see what their priorities for that money okay I'm going to go to the next question begins one more question to the audience how much do you think it cost to build a straw man out of whole cloth and then argue against it well okay answers will be accepted at the tables in the the winning entry gets a free trip to Mars I you know I mean in a sense John you're arguing for caution which means delay and that's what Bob's ejection is says why are we delaying this why are we spending money to delay what sort of delay do you envision at what point would you be able to say with some confidence okay now is the time to send something to Mars whether it's people whether it's robotic exploration but now we're going to look for life well we've been looking for life on Mars with the Viking missions but they went about it in a way that was never going to work the problem is of course is that other priorities have impinged on NASA from time to time now if the lease which was crashing to spacecraft on Mars that were launched in 98 and 99 but basically the planetary protection program has had a protocol in place ready to go to bring back a sample from Mars since 2002 so there's no delay on part of planetary protection nobody in planetary protection wants to take a sample and put it in some lunar orbiting laboratory or anything like that the whole idea of bringing back the sample and not doing it direct from Mars but doing it with respect to an orbital rendezvous was brought up not to break the chain of contact which it doesn't necessarily do but certainly can but because the amount of propellant that you needed in the calculation of some other mission designers to get directly back and land safely in Utah at the Eutaw test and training range was too great to allow you to bring back enough of a sample to make the mission correct so you know I don't get into the spacecraft engineering side but planetary protection could go ahead and do what it needs to do if you said we'll bring back a sample as soon as we can we'll be ready now let me move on a little bit here probably I could I mean is there any chance any real chance that all this back and forth right might be overtaken by events which would be bad news or these guys are on the road this as you know that that while NASA and ISA and other space agencies are worrying about planetary protection Elon Musk signs up a bunch of people he says he wants to be on Mars and what is it five years or something like that RR maybe you know there's a space program that comes out of lo Ursula Bovie or whatever they'll send their own mission to Mars and either find the local inhabitants or badly contaminate the police or both I mean is is there some time in the near future where it doesn't matter anymore what you guys think Bob well okay the problem here actually is that if the planetary protection officer means in business Elon Musk would be prevented from sending people to Mars okay that is if the current regime if the current interpretation of that treaty is sending people to Mars is contaminating Mars we're contaminating it with our evil presence that if that's the case he doesn't get to go that's the whole point it's not merely that NASA is is tying its own feet it will prevent any other American organization from sending people to Mars on their own it is crippling the whole thing and as far as the sample return mission is concerned if you want to know how much the planetary protection program is costing the sample return mission you don't look at the particular things the sterilization procedures and so forth which I admit is small change compared to the cost of the mission although I mean it's something it is how it affects the design and the mission as a whole if you want to know how much the the planetary protection is costing the mission what you need to do is you need to tell JPL we want you to design a Mars sample return mission with the best mission you can with no planetary protection requirements okay and if you see how you could do it that way compared to the mission that must obey the planetary mission requirements and you compare those two missions and they find that they are radically different both in terms of cost and in terms of technical requirements and the one that we could do if we didn't have this burden on us we could do it now we can now land a ton on Mars that is an to win a two-stage ascent vehicle fully fueled don't even have to do is are you my favorite thing making the propellant ours we had to do that when you wanted to delay only 500 kilograms on Mars but you can land thousand kilograms on Mars which we can you can send the thing to the surface of Mars fully fueled with a spirit sized Rover to collect its samples put it in shoot it right back you can get the job done so the question here is do you really want to get that sample or don't you okay do you really want to do the mars science and don't you and certainly reaching the ground water on mars selling up drilling rigs on mars that can actually reach the water which is potentially the habitable environment not the surface okay that that will require humans on Mars and it's way beyond the ability of little robotic Rovers and and and that so it so if we want to do science on Mars properly we need we need to lift this burden okay and if we ever want to settle Mars we obviously need to lift this burden because it is antithetical to the whole idea okay John I'll let you responded we'll go to one more question then we'll I'd love to see the experiment that Bob described about you know tell me what a mission with no planetary protection requirements would cost in how it would be put up and what how would that would affect the sample because that would be a good comparator I mean we know based on JPL internal studies that to do a spirit rover that is actually sterilized well enough to pick up a sample the addition is about fourteen percent as he said not very much money but it's substantial in the middle of a Mars program the plan on planetary protection is basically let's talk about how we implement the policy in the way that's the least expensive the least problematic with respect to implementing the mission and the planetary protection office actually spends a whole lot of time trying to make this as easy as possible given that we can't guarantee that there's no risk and the risk benefit calculation that comes out is basically a bunch of scientists saying trust me I'm going to bring back a sample and it can't possibly have any life in it and we're going to study it to look about evidence of life on Mars are you gonna believe somebody that I'm not because I actually think that you know there may be life on Mars whether it's in the deep subsurface and deep means you know we haven't seen it on Chiron or marsish yet but perhaps you know smaller quantities closer to the surface we could find water the first thing I'm going to do if I bring up a sample from a deep subsurface aquifer is not feed it to the astronauts put it in their fish tanks put it in their you know organisms and their plant growth chambers but actually to contain it and study it as if it might be hazardous because I don't think it's proper to go ahead and hazard humans in a way that you can avoid on an ethical basis including tourists including tourists taken by Elon Musk and yes the United States has you know pledged through the Outer Space Treaty to provide for adequate supervision and authorization of whatever is done by US corporations or people launching but in fact NASA has been studying for the last 17 or more years in fact the first workshop I ever had on this was in 1992 of what the requirement should be if you take humans to Mars and in fact within NASA guidelines and CRISPR guidelines it's perfectly acceptable to take humans to Mars as long as you know what you're doing and you do it in such a way that you can in fact not just not contaminate Mars but not can contaminate the parts of Mars that you might want to use for scientific study if you give up on scientific study then you've got a whole different issue I don't think that NASA wants to actually pay for missions that destroy the ability to look for a second genesis of life on Mars or whatever it was that ended up not being an alh84001 which is about four billion years old by the way it might have pre deceased the you know life on Mars in any event all right one more question for me and then I want to move forward just a bit quite a bit maybe suppose we find Martian microbes you know one meter below the surface very extensively distributed what happens if our descendants want to set up a colony on Mars maybe even terraform the planet if he really could do that I think Carl Sagan once said that Mars is for Martians sounds good but do you think most folks believe that or is it simply humanity's next step in into the cosmos that of course we're going to colonize Mars and if John well you had one way to go first okay this business because I was interested in putting together controlled like illogical life-support systems to support colonies on Mars so I'm all for it but I think that if you're gonna look at Mars as a long-range investment for Humanity one of the things that you'd like to know about is how you might modify Mars to be a better place for humans to live terraforming sometimes it's called there are all sorts of other names that are more obscure even if they're more technically correct I would like to know before I try to terraform Mars whether or not there's a microbe on Mars that might actually push back on that I would like to know because the program won't work if we're dealing with unknowns that are in fact invested in some kind of biogeochemical cycling that we know nothing about so ignorance is not bliss we do need to understand Mars before we want to live on it and before we want to change it and I think that a planetary protection program is part of advanced knowledge that we need to use Mars as a second home for Humanity but certainly not most of the people are ever going to get there the question more directly the the the issue here was that was posed was would it be ethical for you means to settle or terraform Mars if there was native Martian microbes and Sagan took an adversarial view Mars belongs to the Martians I think this is nonsense this is taking concern over the exploitation of less technologically developed people's on earth by imperialists and transferring that concern to a domain where it does not apply okay the what we did do the American Indians was wrong because they were people okay what Albert Schweitzer did to microbes in Africa when he brought antibiotics there was just fine okay the ethics needs to be human centered okay doctors who killed microbes with antibiotics are acting ethically okay with Adolf Hitler killed millions of people creating food for trillions of microbes he was acting unethically okay so look you know here we are in America okay now before you know Columbus there were Native Americans there were vast herds of bison they were incredible redwood forests okay we came here we destroyed much of that we replaced it with a continental nation of 300 million people living in Liberty with universities and used bookstores and and all this stuff okay now okay so something was destroyed and something else was created and it is a matter of controversy as to whether the net trade was good or bad now I happen to think that net trade was strongly positive if you take it but I will nevertheless admit to you that something of value was destroyed however I submit to you that if there have been nothing here when Columbus landed but a desert okay without any vegetation no bison no redwoods no Indians just a desert with maybe a few microbes under the rocks nobody would be picketing Columbus Day parades today okay so that that's the difference on Mars we have a chance to do to create new branches human civilization with enhance because even John Rummel will admit there are not people on Mars right now that we would not be destroying civilizations okay okay and and so there it is so from the point of view of ethics this idea that Mars should be left as a preserve for Navy native Martian microbes is not an ethical position it's an aesthetic position and it's an aesthetic position that is anti-human and frankly anti-life completely so I mean let's think about what we might learn from discovering life on Mars rather than discovering life we brought with us from Florida and that is part of the stewardship argument and one about why you would want to learn those things before you change Mars irreversibly so that all that life gets killed off so the knowledge is important I always appreciate Bob when he takes strong positions against positions I'm not advocating because it makes for a much more difficult debate - I can't disagree with him in certain ways although I will say you know when I was at Stanford as a grad student one of my professors Paul air like wrote a book called extinction and the point he had and he envisioned this is getting out of the airplane when somebody was plucking rivets out of the wing and he goes well why are you plucking rivets out of the wings we don't need those they they're not important and you know the plane will fly with a lot of the rivets taken out well we're on a plane called Earth and I very much worried about the things that we're plucking out of the wing and making it very much more difficult to fly this earth I think we need to think about it we need to be very careful we have an opportunity on Mars to do it right and I would advocate that if we want to have a future for Humanity on Mars whether they be explorers scientists or tourists or just librarians which is one position that we take it slow and we understand where the costs and the benefits can be applied so that we can get the best out of our neighboring planet ethically responsibly and profitably alright those of you who have questions this is the microphone down here this gentleman in the blue shirt will screen them for suitability and we'll get to that well while you're lining up I can't resist I've tried to stop myself from telling yet more Bob Zubrin stories but I do remember one that we were at the mid mid what was Mid Continent space development conference which was held in Ames Iowa in February which is a lovely place to be in February I have to say and well and at one point super came up to me and he said all right so how much do you think getting a message from this is a SETI story so not to contaminate this discussion how much do you think it would be worth to companies like hewlett-packard or some other technology company to have information from an advanced society that you might find with your city experiments and so I don't know Bob I don't know probably tens of billions of dollars he said well do you think you could find the aliens for with tens of billions of dollars and I said oh yeah of course and he said sell stock it was his answer okay gentlemen so I have a question for John and Bob so John you you know that there are lots of studies and estimates showing that an asteroid could hit the earth the Sun will blow up eventually etcetera the earth is a finite time resource that we have as a civilization so how do you analytically decide the trade-off between the delay and the costs and the care and the caution not based on intuition not based on principles but analytically and four-ball I have a question which is most scientists tend to be very curious creatures they tend to be very adventurous they want to be forward about their research they've invested their lifetimes in it why do you think you're in the minority why is the establishment scientific community not taking your position why is the establishment scientific community sticking to a more cautious position I'd like to hear both your thoughts on that it's an interesting question about analytically how you deal with the asteroid threat I mean the reason that there are Mars rocks that land on the earth every year is because Mars has been hit by asteroids we have earth asteroid impacts that have caused all sorts of issues and rocks that go the other way so there's this natural interchange between Earth and Mars it's been looked at analytically by modelers who have determined that it's very likely that there's about 1/10 of the number of Earth rocks hitting Mars every year question is that the earth will die soon there won't die soon like we know that asteroids could hit it and destroy it it doesn't like we and the rate at which mankind is progressing it's very unlikely that we will be able to become a space like interplanetary species if you look at our trajectories so like well can we talk about the planetary defense officer position and the fact that NASA and others are going to do a mission called dark just looking at how to avert the asteroid threat but that kind of planetary protection you're not trading off against something that happens regularly you to incur skin-like events chill Yabut you know all those those kind of events do happen that gets the attention of politicians to go hey maybe it's worth paying to save everybody on the planet but it's mostly going to be saving civilization and a lot of people on the planet the microbes are gonna be just fine so you know these things have happened before I can show you you know all sorts of interesting impact craters on the earth the earth didn't die people around there died lots of mosquitoes got killed in the Tunguska event but you know effectively we do the best we can we'll go to Mars as soon as we can but why would you go and screw it up when you know you could do it right how could why don't we go to the next gentleman and Bob can get the first cut at that I encourage you to ask only one question because that's what I said I thought oh there's questions for both of them first first of all this is pretty great debate I've really enjoyed it thank you and although I fully expect that when we do get to Mars we will find a Starbucks there possibly two of them if that doesn't happen when we have this is kind of a follow up to assess third or final question when when we have say we go and we find evidence either through astronauts carefully landing on Mars or uncaring or robots or robots controlled by people in Phobos whatever we find either one a second Genesis or to our cousins from asteroid impacts like that and what what then do we do like how much of how much do we have to protect it if what if there's like several pockets of Martian life and tiny isolated areas but they're not necessarily related they're like under you know thermal vent kind of things how much do we save and put in you know the museum or the or protected area and before we exploit the heck out of whatever else there is and is there a point at which the office of planetary protection says okay we're done our job here is done or is that ongoing even with like a million colonists two million pounds whatever well that would be uncharacteristic of any known bureaucracy the job is never done by definition now look you know humans have settled the earth we have not driven the subsurface microbial world into extinction or altered it we have not affected the life in the mid-ocean vent hydrothermal systems you know it's if if there was a microbial biosphere on Mars it's inconceivable that humans by settling Mars could drive it into extinction we took the the heroic effort for us to drive into extinction certain pathogens a polio virus or I'm not even sure we've done it but but and it's it's a microorganism that lives in us okay but in terms of affecting the microbes in the world at large it's beyond our capacity but what I would also but certainly when we go there we'll we'll take samples and so forth sore scientific study but look Mars is more than an object of scientific inquiry it is that it is a rosetta stone for letting us know the truth about the potential prevalence and diversity of life in the universe although it is not the only such way one can proceed on this but what it is it's a world it's a world that has honored all the resources needed for life and therefore free technological civilization and if humans can go there and develop the technologies to turn martian materials into resources because there is no such thing as a natural resource there's only natural raw materials it is human creativity that turns materials into resources and this is what Ehrlich did not understand which is why all his predictions have been wildly wrong okay via his commodity predictions not his predictions no no no no early early okay publish this book in 1968 okay and anything here we are in 1968 a lot of the world's poor world's population to double by the year 2000 they're going to be starving in the streets and not just in India but here in the United States unless we have laws that limit the number of children that people can have okay and well he was right about part of it okay took till 2010 for the world population to double relative to 1968 but the standard of living was not cut in half okay in 1968 the average per-capita income in the world in 2010 dollars about $3,500 by 2010 it was $9,000 okay so the population doubled and the per capita income tripled okay so and by the way the same mistake was made by Malthus okay who what they don't understand is that humans are not destroyers humans are creators okay as the population of the world has gone up the standard of living has gone up its mouth hasn't had his way and they had limited population in the ninth century so that they had half as many people as they did okay they would have used a little less coal but would we be better off or not we didn't need that coal but get rid of either Thomas Edison or Louie pests or take your pick okay the you know where its standard of living resources depend on inventions and inventions are made by people and the more people there are and the higher their standard of living and the freer they are the more inventions you get and inventions are cumulative okay and that's why the Malthusian argument has always been completely wrong but it hasn't but it has been extremely dangerous and and and I want to get to this because the major threat we face on earth today it's not asteroid impacts it's not climate change it's not resource exhaustion it's bad ideas okay bad ideas responsible for the great catastrophes of the 20th century and bad ideas have bad consequences the worst idea that there is is that resources are limited because the idea that resources are limited sets all nations against each other if you if you if you say there's only so much to go around then fundamentally we're all enemies if you if people come to believe that there's only so much to go around the 21st century will be a century of world wars as more time strophic than those in the 20th century okay and fundamentally by the way this is why we have to go to Mars no not to get Martian resources but to prove that resources are unlimited to prove that we are not enemies to prove that Humanity is fundamentally joint friends joined in a venture to expand our resource base to expand our prospects to expand our frontiers and this is why we cannot allow this progress to be sabotaged by a bureaucracy whose only interest is preserving it it's the one who gets to explain to somebody with a rhinoceroses because yeah because they've all been killed off by poachers who are the part of the population that has multiplied the number of bad ideas out there unfortunately a large population doesn't only multiply good ideas it multiplies bad ideas too and the fact is that yes a population standard of living is increased in some places some of those all buying Li some of those people are buying rhinoceros horns despite what it does to the African wildlife but in particular you know the people's standard of living goes up they do other things with it and people might you know project so you know you have a choice of standard of living so you can pay your cable bill I mean because a lot of people do and unusual things and it's not up to us to judge what they should or shouldn't do but it is good to make sure that everybody gets fed and right now we have this fundamental competition for energy looking at different kinds we have people who grow corn so that they can make alcohol out of it and they use the alcohol to fuel cars but there are people who don't have enough to eat we don't have to make those decisions with planetary protection we just eliminate contamination they could ruin the investment in space-exploration you do want the the population of this line has doubled their standard of patience has declined yes dr. rubble I want to ask operating under the assumption that planetary protection is both necessary and proper and assuming we fully comply with it for the future there is no amount of robotic exploration that will conclusively prove the negative that there is no life on Mars that we risk forward contaminating so if we continue to act under P P eyes requirements what threshold of negative detection what evidence-based threshold can we hold ourselves to before we say ppi is no longer necessary how many probes don't miss the point planetary protection forward contamination is to protect Mars from contamination that might be discovered and thought to be Martian we're not doing this to protect Martians against death okay this is not an ethical question of I don't want to kill off Martians this is I don't want to make a stupid mistake and discover life that I brought with me but it's question still holds so how how many probes how many Rovers how many years looking for Mars life is a general phenomenon I'm not here advocating actually what the Mars program at NASA or any group of space agencies has to do to find life right now I can tell you that since Viking no mission has been sent that is actually looking for life so you can send lots of those missions and never find then on what basis will we ever abandoned pbi if no mission is imaginable somebody found someplace that was warm and wet enough they'd like to look at it but that's a different question there's a 1999 study the exobiology strategy for the exploration of Mars and that can answer your question in a you know textual fashion but we're not trying to protect Martians against all threats we're trying to protect ourselves against some stupid mistake I mean maybe maybe John you could mention drilling in Lake Vostok is that not a good analogy or maybe looking at your face I guess it's drilling on Lake Vostok the Russians couldn't control their end of the drill string and the problem was is that they were gonna let a lot of contaminants into the lake if they went ahead without actually testing and controlling their equipment that they were using so they held up for a few years they tested their drill spring they've gone into Lake Vostok now and surprise they can detect some of the contaminants and they haven't detected any microbial you know kind of miraculous place but they do find hydrothermal vent organisms in Lake Vostok was just interesting all right let's go to the next person in line this for you John in your slides I saw what looked like biosphere 2 or something on Mars you know where there was this colony and the Canadian lady with all the stuff that was growing I don't know it was it was that the Elon Musk the Elon Musk I presume though you don't ask that dumb was I guess closed ecosystem for people couldn't say the only thing I would guarantee you that if you on musk established as a tourist business on Mars you will find showers for everybody who gets there the question in my mind is do we know anything to be clean on the trip do we know enough about earth life so that we could design a closed-loop life support system that could support people for more than you know for up to two years yes we do we know all the mistakes at biosphere 2 made among other things really surprisingly that they didn't seal the concrete and biosphere 2 and it absorbed all the carbon dioxide the plant shut down photosynthesis because they couldn't get carbon dioxide and you know the oxygen levels crashed it was a very interesting thing they also had you know too much light coming into their ocean but you know I think we could make a dome that with physical chemical assistance could support anybody who wanted to go there the other thing you're gonna find in you know a Mars tourists basis a place to buy a t-shirt that said I came all the way to Mars and all I got was this stupid t-shirt but the the fact is that you know there's a lot of work to be done on the tourist experience and hopefully a really nice greenhouse that provides a change much as it does at us and Arctic station could be built musk it's not talking about setting up a tourist business on Mars no well no he's talking about settlement knowing that setting colonists tourists the question is how long is my current understanding of closed loop life-support systems sustain a colony on Mars before some problem there's a whole dynamic here between exogenous control and endogenous control there's a paper that Tyler Volk and I did in a lunar the second lunar maglev symposium where we actually Illustrated some of the issues associated with that if you take about a you know l5 colony you want to be big enough so that endogenous control all can deal with a lot of the control issues but you're still gonna have to have some exhaustion as control because you don't have the buffers that are available in earth or biosphere all right we're gonna enter the lightning round now because we got five more minutes in this room before they bring in the I heard about the near-earth object question earlier god there's a steady talk yesterday would they probably feel a lot better hearing Brad Bush talked about it last night so Bob so to John's point with a second Genesis there's a lot of reason to believe it that's pristine and we can really study it that that's extremely valuable scientific triangulation we don't know we're gonna learn from that it's and I get the part about the Canadian Geese and I'm not sure I buy that everything that's on Mars has gotten here so how do you account for that you're talking about a huge cost it's a huge loss well if we don't if we actually had that triangulation heating precise listen and you consider the Trump administration as well so well now second Genesis right all hearth life is the same okay okay he brought up the issue of studying the second Genesis on Mars and the importance of that and okay so just to to lay the basis okay all earth life is the same that is whether you're talking about Paramecium mushrooms crocodiles people okay we all use the same chemical system of RNA and DNA use the same score of amino acids you know it's it's all the same kind of bricks just put together in different ways and so and that is why you can have these trees of life which show that all earth life is fundamentally related now if there's a lot of our priority reasons to believe I mean that there's people who disagree with this but the devil s there's a lot of our priority reasons to believe that the phenomenon of life and the complexity that requires require carbon-based life-forms and water and and that the chemistry in general has to be of that sort but the fact that it has to be RNA and DNA and double helixes and that's the only way to replicate information from one generation to the next frankly there isn't a a priori argument for that you know that's like saying the Latin alphabet has to be the only alphabet but in fact there's the Cyrillic alphabet there's a Chinese alphabet Arabic alphabets lots of ways you can do an alphabet that you don't have to do it just the way we do it okay now if there was a second Genesis okay the proof of that frankly would be that it used a different alphabet okay we're expecting I mean to find if we find life to find carbon-based carbon water-based life-forms but it could use an entirely different alphabet it could use a different information system and and that would be readily distinguishable from terrestrial life absolutely so this idea that we have to stop we microbes from going there because we wouldn't know if we've found a second Janet and know if we the only thing that terrestrial microbes would interfere with is if they're if the native Martian biosphere was using the same information system as us and then you would then not know whether you brought it or the other although one has to say we have tools to address that question you know if you can remember the anthrax scare in 2001 okay they were able to tell first of all that it was microbes they were able to tell them it was not just microbes it was anthrax not only were they able to tell that they were able to tell that it was a strand of anthrax that had been brought out of a lab in the ames iowa okay in 1987 that that is that the degree of genetic drift that had occurred in that culture had been 14 years worth relative to its point of origin now if if we go to Mars and we find ecoli of the same type that are currently prevalent in florida you probably brought it okay if you find microbes that resemble terrestrial microbes but you know they look like they have diverged from us for 60 million years was probably debris from the KT impact that brought them there okay but if you find things that don't use DNA and RNA you didn't bring that that is a second Genesis and and you will know it and you can study it and of course it should be studied but you know Mars is taking massive impacts of meteors and asteroids and all this and if it hasn't been knocked out the Martian biosphere hasn't been knocked out by all the hits that it's taken in Martian history it's not going to be knocked out by you know a few earth Landers go ahead teri I just want to talk about we've recently found planets including Earth's and super Earths are fairly common out there relative to the number of stars and so by extrapolation we've got billions and of things planets in our solar system in our galaxy that we have conditions to support life and then there's billions of galaxies now we don't know if there's any life out there and if we find life independently arose on Mars then that's a strong argument that it's common throughout our galaxy if we find zero life arose independently on Mars don't we have an argument that we may we may be alone we don't know there's just huge amounts at stake see and so write in different ways but that's an astrobiology question not a planetary protection Allison all right you see the last question the young woman who's been staying there our next speaker is behind her he'll be up here later thank you I guess just quickly would it be safe to say that dr. Zubrin is talking about the universe as an open system whereas John has been talking I'm sorry I don't know your surname or I would also just use doctor but are you talking about a keeping things as a closed system treating Mars as a laboratory or I dare say a reservation actually what I'm talking about is you know making sure that if we make a decision to change how we use the solar system that we make it before we do the changes it's really a matter we know what's there to decide unless we go there I think the ethical and the it's a risk benefit calculation we obviously the easiest way to prevent for contamination of another planet is to stay here and I agree with Bob stone pardon and contaminate Yellowstone yeah well I mean we're already doing that there is a concern about the bottom water getting warmer that may actually have implications on deep sea hydrothermal vent organisms and others at the sea bottom that quite pervasive and we could be responsible for part of it I'm not going to get into a discussion about sea level rise global changed etcetera because they started 18,000 years ago the oceans coming back it's an interglacial we can make it worse but we're not going to fix that how that affects the ocean bottom water and the Atlantic maternal circulation not an issue but if we're going to go out and study other worlds I would like to leave them in a condition that I found them until I or somebody around here or maybe this whole group of people including Bob decide hey we're gonna go use that a different way all right I hate to say it it sounds like the prime directive actually I hate to say but they do want us out of here at 8:30 and I know that some of you but I don't want you to leave before I give these to you because I don't want you to think that the SETI Institute cheeps out on the on over area it's alright you got a check before you go anywhere and they said no no no bring him to you but I just want to say that Li handed the east to me with his hands so they have been pre contaminated or if you prefer pre enlivened thank you

Channel: SETI Institute

Views: 45,189

Rating: 4.6422763 out of 5

Keywords: John Rummel, Rober Zubrin, Protecting Mars, Planetary protection, earth contamination, Mars, planetary exploration, solar system

Id: m0PxJt_09sQ

Length: 80min 0sec (4800 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 30 2018