You can look at this from a different angle, humans have ventured out to another planet where a delicate Eco system exists struggling in the harsh conditions, and dumped a bacterior/virus laden small family sized lump of shit there! More stuff that is alien to the planet and something that will slowly corrode and seep poison into the surrounding area. Jus sayin
We desperately want to find evidence of life on Mars. If we do find that there is or was life on the closest planet that could have ever possibly supported it then it would go a long way to prove that what happened on Earth was not an accident. Maybe this is what is supposed to happen and there is life everywhere. If that's true than we can't be alone. I think that's worth a few dollars and a lot of effort.
http://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/bodies-mars/ They're aware of the potential for biological contamination, and spacecraft that land on Mars are sterilized. No bacteria or viruses. You don't even know that there is a delicate ecosystem on Mars, because we haven't discovered life there yet. And without liquid water, chemical contamination is pretty contained to wherever you leave it.
Any cooties Curiosity may have would be sterilized by the surface of Mars or during insertion into the Martian atmosphere. Brutal cold, intense radiation, no oxygen...
Let me put it to you in simple words: Any bugs the Earth has would be burned/irradiated beyond any level for hope of evolution.They would be destroyed long before it could evolve into a super bug. Nothing on Earth that is biological, bacterial, viral, living or dead, could exist long enough for it to adapt in the amount of radiation and heat that exists in space... and that is before it gets bathed in it some more as it lands onto a planetary surface. That just adds mega fuckloads of heat that not even the biggest, baddest virus on Earth could sustain for even a second. Then you have the issue that the lack of an atmosphere and complete lack of Oxygen will cause the bugs to die due to no Oxygen..... Provided the fucktons of heat and radiation doesn't extra kill it. Poison? Corrode? WTF are you talking about? It is not as if there is a long line of space travelers that are going to visit that planet, much less be exposed to the planet's atmosphere outside their space suit. By the time humanity gets off it's ass and actually gets to that planet, the radiation, heat, and cosmic rays would incinerate the shit many times over. So, I give you an A for your trolling efforts, but a F for execution. That video was briefly DMCAed...That was until Youtube realized the mistake.
To create a cultural setting for good science, you have to restrain the market pressures to make a buck. People need the elbow room to make decisions contrary to their own financial best interests when that will serve the cause of our common understanding of how the world works. You don't need to remove financial incentives from the game entirely. You just need to keep them visible and within a certain comfort zone. Hospitals and medical schools had more government subsidies twenty years ago. Consequently they could turn their noses up at financing from companies insisting that a therapy be accepted and promoted without sufficient evidence. But times have been tough since the mid 1990s, and so our teaching hospitals --once the guardians of good science within medicine-- have become dependent in part upon quack promoters with deep pockets. Twenty years ago, I would never have guessed that the American Academy of Family Physicians would invite a woo promoter like Andrew Weil to give its keynote address. But there it is. So I cannot agree with adhocrat's feeling that private money is always best.
Pretty contained, when you have global dust storms, with winds between 30-50 mph? As the craft slowly decomposes, granted it will be many many years, the man made materials will get scattered far and wide. As we have no knowledge as to if there is life or an ecosystem the depositing of materials made on another planet could, and I mean could, have consequences. Ps. Water not required for contamination.
You're not even mentioning the nuke power pack. But that okay. Earth has had perfectly natural nuclear reactors operating in the past. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ancient-nuclear-reactor
You're retarded. The atmosphere on Mars is less than 1% of Earth's atmosphere, so those 30-50 mph winds pack about 1% of the punch they do on Earth. The craft will not "decompose" on any appreciable time scale, since Mars's atmosphere is 99% carbon dioxide, which is fully oxidized - and there is almost no free oxygen. "Decomposition" or "corrosion" of the type we typically talk about on Earth requires an aerobic environment. Mars is cold enough that the man-made materials of any spacecraft should remain in the solid state, limiting their spread. And I didn't say water, I said liquid water. Liquid water isn't required for contamination, but it IS OFTEN required for contamination to be able to spread.
In simple words. We are still discovering bacteriors that are existing, and even thriving, in environments we thought impossible for life. Even inside nuclear reactors! Read moar, Think again. Oxygen, lol. Really? As for contamination and humans going there in the future, well that one went way over your head didn't it, who gives a fuck about humans, I was talking about the effects on any possible undiscovered life on mars. No good going all that way to find that the decomposing craft you sent 20 years before has seeped into the ecosystem and wiped out the struggling life forms there! Not trolling, just a serious point put in a non serious way, humans have wiped out humans just by meeting for the first time. It happens. I give you an A for lack of thought and an F for education.
Entropy, nothing will stay in the same state forever. You are thinking on too small a timescale. Over time, winds and dust, extreme temp swings ( read more about mars temps) will all have an effect on the man made materials. It will slowly decompose and enter into the environment. All those electronics, power cells, plastics etc are alien to mars. Who knows what the effects will be. Contamination can be airborne by the way. And as we cannot be sure what is on mars how can you be sure no chemical reactions will take place, we barely have a basic understanding of how the earths ecosystem works let alone mars! I will let the retarded comment go, your obviously American.
When they design a craft to withstand the mars environment they only look at the timescale needed for it to carry out its purpose, not indefinitely.
fify You are short-sighted too. Humans will be there long before the contamination of their robotic spacecraft becomes a problem. The first manned mission is going to last almost two years, and it should occur within the next 20 to 30 years - it will probably leave contamination behind. Mars is going to be contaminated anyway if we ever colonize it. It's also a big planet, and the lack of running water and a significant atmosphere will make it harder not easier to spread contamination than on Earth.
If we find that there is no life on Mars, then you'd have no objections to colonizing it, no? The rover is there to find out whether there's life. If the rover and all future scientific missions find no life, your objections are pointless, no? Why do you hate the rover? Why do you hate America's firefighters?
I just hate the way we seem to fuck up everything we touch. Now we are spreading our shit elsewhere. I had no objections, I was discussing the possibilities from a different angle. Thinking outside the box if you will. Firefighters no, Americans.........meh
fify I'd much prefer it if people as passionate as you would spend your time thinking out of the box about Earth's environment, rather than worrying about Mars's. Earth is the environment that really matters. Morally, you can't really argue with that, unless you despise your own species and all other life as you know it.
Ok, so we can't stop destroying our own environment and possibly threatening our own existence so let's go fuck up somewhere else as well right. Try this one for size, instead of seeking better more environmentally friendly ways to produce electricity, how about spending as much time, money and effort in reducing how much electricity we need as an individual? The obsession for gadgets and bigger and better, faster computers, everyone having internetz ergo more computers, phones that do more thus consume more power, electric cars, more electricity needed if millions go that route, air conditioning everywhere. The list goes on. Nowadays we demand compensation if the power goes off for a while, it's becoming as important as oxygen! We are reliant, especially in the "developed" countries, on electricity. And we are demanding more and more, why not think the other way, be obsessed with using less. As for our species, nothing to be proud about.
No, but apparently your smashed cell phone gets better reception there than Curiosity gets on Mars. Imagine that!
I only despise my own species. It's that "x factor' Hawking mentions, a wild card. Every other life form is doing what it is supposed to do. As soon as we grew thumbs and brains, we started to murder the thing that sustains life for all of us. Dumb humans suck and there are too many of them. We're gonna move to one of Jupiter's moons and leave the greedy, the religious, and the stupid behind. We will use another moon as a tourist trap, but you cannot stay unless you qualify. I'm pretty smart, but I'll probably be a janitor there. Lotsa ppl are way smarter than I, but they don't make amusing paper mache sculptures.
The solution is simple. Uncontrolled reproduction has got to stop, and that ain't gonna happen in my lifetime. However, a nice pandemic could get our numbers back down to reasonable levels. One way or another, this is going to crash, and life as we know it will end. Invest in soft gold metal that monkeys like? Nah, can't eat it, burn it, wipe your ass with it. Heh.
