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Re: Back-contamination


Hi Gene - 

> > Some of the biologists working on this, the ones
> > with veto power over any Mars projects, disagree >with you.
> 
> First off, who gave them veto power? 

The Congress.  It's in their charters.

>First off, there is absolutely no
> evidence for life on Mars.

There are some biologists who disagree with you on this, and while
there is no concensus among biologists,
most of them think that far more evidence needs to be 
collected before anything more than very tenative 
conclusions can be reached.

> Second, the Martian regolith is rich in
> peroxides. A great way to sterilize something is to toss some Mars
dust
> on it. 

Yes - I heard Carl Sagan say the same thing at 
the Association of Space Explorers meeting in DC
a few years back.  He thought that life had evolved
on Mars, but then the atmosphere had changed into 
hydorgen peroxide, which had then sterilized everything. Sagan was
pleased by this, as since Mars was now dead it meant it would be safe
for men to go there, and that they would then find fossils of earlier
life forms, indicating that life was very common in the universe.  BUT
FIRST, more unmanned probes would be 
needed to make all this certain, in other words that Mars was indeed
dead.

>And, if there is life on Mars, it might survive but >could in no
> way thrive on Earth. 

I don't know if its particularly wise to make flat out assertions
about hypothetical life forms which may or may not exist. I don't do it.

>This brings up Zubrin's comparison of sharks on the
> Serengeti. 

It looks like Zubrin's sharks in the desert fare no better than
strawmen in arguments. 
 
> The biggest threat is that something on Mars will >have population
> explosion on Earth. That is doubtful in the extreme. >It could never
> outcompete life that has evolved here for 3500 million years. 

See above. 

> The threat is enough to exercise caution sense with quarantine,

Actually, the biologists propose a different remedy
than quarantine.

> but to
> veto manned Mars exploration due to unfounded possibilities, is
lunacy.

The biologists want to be real sure whether or not 
those possibilities are indeed unfounded.
  
> > > And anyway, they didn't stop Apollo.
> > 
> > The Moon is not Mars.
> 
> The Moon was percieved as a possible threat in the form of
> back-contamination.

Yep.

> Unfortuatly, it looks like less >sane heads are
> running things now.

I'm pretty sure they are not concerned about your evaluations of their
sanity.

>To (roughly) quote the microbiologists you keep
> citing, their conclusion is: "While the threat of >Mars life is
> incredibly small, it is not zero." 

No.  What the consensus is is that no one absolutely knows whether or
not life exists on Mars.

>That phrase is >very different from 
> "Don't go, you'll kill us all!". 

That's not what they say either.  What they do say is
that a whole lot more data is going to have to be gathered before it
will be remotely possible to evaluate the danger.

>I think that your biologists know
> enough about Mars to say that the threat is tiny, but >they said it is
> not zero because we don't know anything about it, and they wanted to
> cover all the bases. We should go to Mars, hopefully >sooner than
later.

No. They pretty much say what I've said they say.

                                 Best wishes - 
                                      Ed


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