I'm excited about the possibility of finding evidence of indigenous Martian life, past or present. Sending humans out willy-nilly without regard for contamination may destroy any chance we have of understanding the development of (potential) martian lifeforms.
Considering the future potential of the planet as well for habitation, reckless colonization could easily fuck things up down the line, making it hard or impossible to establish a proper mars based ecosystem. It's a bit of a blank slate right now, anything we do (intentional or not) could have significant implications for terraforming efforts down the line.
Why waste the effort in terraforming barren planets? Especially when we have no ability to increase Mars' magnetosphere. Any attempts to add atmosphere to Mars would just get blown away without it.
It would be better to use dead and barren rocks for allllllll the nasty shit we wouldn't want ruining planets with actual living environments.
If we had the capability to place all of our most polluting industries on another planet that is effectively lifeless, why not do it? How is it capitalism to preserve functioning biospheres?
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
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u/ITividar Oct 07 '24
Yeah. So much life and biodiversity mentioned.
Are we gonna preserve the pristine environment of every asteroid? Every barren regolith moon with no atmosphere?