An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

[helen]

I saw this piece on the CNN's web site about NASA's plan to send people to the moon by 2018. What really struck me as strange is this excerpt:

NASA's plan envisions being able to land four-person human crews anywhere on the Moon's surface and to eventually use the system to transport crew members to and from a lunar outpost that it would consider building on the lunar south pole, according to the charts, because of the regions elevated quantities of hydrogen and possibly water ice.

One of NASA's reasons for going back to the Moon is to demonstrate that astronauts can essentially "live off the land" by using lunar resources to produce potable water, fuel and other valuable commodities.

I suppose one could make water from extracting hydrogen and oxygen from rocks and then making water from it but does any one see the dilemma in consuming untreated water from ice on either the Moon or Mars? Wouldn't that be an unsafe condition for the astronauts, drinking water that could contain germs from another planet (it's more an issue for Mars then for the Moon).

And even if you do treat the water to make it safe to drink, wouldn't that be killing the lifeforms you are trying to go out of your way to find in the first place?

[craigwatanabe]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

using reverse osmosis you can safely remove any living organism and put it back while letting the filtering system allow only the oxygen and hydrogen molecules to pass thru giving you pure water.

[Composite 2992]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

And even if you do treat the water to make it safe to drink, wouldn't that be killing the lifeforms you are trying to go out of your way to find in the first place?

I think I saw a cartoon once where a space probe ends up landing right atop a living organism and killing the last living thing on that planet.

NASA always considers the possibility of negative interaction with other life forms. The original moon explorers were put into quarantine on return to Earth. And recently the Galileo space probe was deliberately crashed into Jupiter to avoid any chance of contaminating Europa.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

And even if you do treat the water to make it safe to drink, wouldn't that be killing the lifeforms you are trying to go out of your way to find in the first place?

Sure, if there were alien bugs in the Martian ice that astronauts mined and purified for human use, they'd probably be killed by purification of the water. But that'd be only a few thousand gallons of water out of a whole planetful. If these Martian bacteria would be threatened by the destruction of that small a fraction of their habitat, then they'd be already so close to extinction that we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. There's not much that could be done, short of never going in the first place.

[helen]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

It may cost more to do and develop but building a bigger spaceship that can hold more stuff like fuel, food and water. Think about getting there and back faster which means you need to carry more fuel, spend less time on Mars so it cuts down on the amount of food and water to carry so you can carry more fuel.

[Menehune Man]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

Question? If we actually set up campsites on the moon, it wouldn't take long before we started mining the moon for raw materials and shipping it back down to the earth, which would in time make the moon lighter-(mass & gravitational pull), while at the same time making the earth heavier. That would have to throw something out of whack. The moon might start floating away or coming in closer. Just a thought.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

Question? If we actually set up campsites on the moon, it wouldn't take long before we started mining the moon for raw materials and shipping it back down to the earth, which would in time make the moon lighter-(mass & gravitational pull), while at the same time making the earth heavier. That would have to throw something out of whack. The moon might start floating away or coming in closer. Just a thought.

Menehune Man, I don't think you appreciate just how big the moon is. It would take a very long time. For example:

The mass of the moon is about 7.36 × 10^22 kilograms.
Annual world production of cement is about 1.8 × 10^12 kilograms.

If all the countries of the world switched from using Earth rock to using moon rock to make all the cement that everybody uses in the whole world, it would take about 30 million years to use up even 1/1000th of the moon's mass at that rate.

It would take more than 300 billion years to use up the entire moon at that rate. That's almost 30 times longer than current age of the universe, and more than 50 times longer than the time before the sun turns into a red giant and roasts the Earth.

[pzarquon]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

We may also be adding mass to the Moon as we remove material.

Besides. The moon is moving away from Earth, at an incredibly slow rate. Within a few dozen generations, perhaps, the perfect halo we see now for solar eclipses will in fact become history.

It's just chance we happen to be on Earth at the time the moon's distance is just so, and a few thousand years from now, an "eclipsed sun" will be too bright to really observe with the naked eye.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

Besides. The moon is moving away from Earth, at an incredibly slow rate. Within a few dozen generations, perhaps, the perfect halo we see now for solar eclipses will in fact become history.

It's just chance we happen to be on Earth at the time the moon's distance is just so, and a few thousand years from now, an "eclipsed sun" will be too bright to really observe with the naked eye.

Don't worry; it'll take a lot longer than just a few dozen generations. It's estimated that it'll take 500 million years or so before Earth experiences its last total eclipse.

[mel]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

Speaking of eclipses, there's an annular solar eclipse happening tomorrow (probably right now tonight) in certain parts of Europe, the Middle East/Africa and India. The annular eclipse is one where the entire disk of the moon goes in front of the sun, but does not cover the entire sun... so like you still need the protective eye gear when the thing goes into "totality". Of course since its night here, we see nothin'....

[alohabear]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

I saw this piece on the CNN's web site about NASA's plan to send people to the moon by 2018. What really struck me as strange is this excerpt:


I suppose one could make water from extracting hydrogen and oxygen from rocks and then making water from it but does any one see the dilemma in consuming untreated water from ice on either the Moon or Mars? Wouldn't that be an unsafe condition for the astronauts, drinking water that could contain germs from another planet (it's more an issue for Mars then for the Moon).

And even if you do treat the water to make it safe to drink, wouldn't that be killing the lifeforms you are trying to go out of your way to find in the first place?

Well ...It's not like thier breaking the "Prime Directive" here it's just to get people interested in space again.

[sinjin]

Re: An ethical dilemma in manned spaceflight

There are no germs on the moon. If we went to Mars and found germs we'd be celebrating.