Terraforming ethics

[Mike]

If we find no signs of life on a planetoid somewhere, I have no issue with exploiting its resources, terraforming, or whatever. If there is any hint of life, we back off pending giant amounts of study and debate.

But what about on a planet we have already terraformed? If we create a biosphere from the ground up, what are our obligations to it? Are we obligated to protect and preserve it? Or if it turns out to not exactly meet our needs, are we okay with letting it die out, or just wiping it out to start over?

[Cazmonster]

Should the time come when we can terraform planets, we would have a responsibility to do it correctly. I can't imagine terraforming being something done in a matter of weeks or months. Managing the transformation so that the outcome is as expected would be more important than the idea of 'resetting', at least to me.

[Tahlvin]

[Mike]

Right, but how sentient? So if you've got a planet populated with a variety of lifeforms, and maybe the highest level of intelligence is something like sheep, and it's clear that things are not worth our extra resources to maintain in the long term (based on someone's judgment of 'worthwhile')... is that enough to say that we shouldn't just wipe the planet clean and start over? Should we let them play out to their natural end?

Part of me wants to think that if we are advanced enough to be bioengineering and terraforming to this degree, then we'll also be enlightened enough to wield those technologies wisely, but nothing in our history really shows that that's any more likely than the opposite.

[Kyle]

In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series, there was an underground faction that believed it was morally wrong to terraform Mars even though it had no life on it. They argued that it was morally wrong to disrupt the environment that had formed over billions of years just to make it earth-like.

At first I thought this was ridiculous, but then I thought- Hmm. If we draw the lines at certain types of life, or even the presence or absence of life itself, isn't that kind of arbitrary? Is it really wrong to think that we have an obligation to not disturb the ecological processes of a lifeless planet that's formed over eons?

[Mike]

In the long term, I think it's going to be a moot point. IF we ever do any terraforming, it'll be on Mars, and maaaaaaaybe on Venus. But by the time we get good enough to even think about that, we'll be at a point where we realize it's far more cost effective for us to simply live in space habitats. We'll build 20 km long rotating cylinders that are nearly fully self-contained and can support thousands of humans or many generations indefinitely. The moral question of disturbing planets will be left by the wayside, because no one will want to do it.

Of course, if you're going to extent your moral compass to protecting a planet's native environment whether it contains life or not, then why wouldn't that apply to random chunks of rock floating in the asteroid belt as well? We have to disturb our environment to some degree just to continue existing. So we need to decide how much disturbance our survival justifies.

[Phoebe]

[Kyle]

[Mike]

[Kyle]

[bralbovsky]

This, of course, begs the question about whether we are living on an already terraformed planet, waiting for/working toward....who knows what.

A favorite thought exercise is exemplified by the second edition Twilight Zone "A Small Talent for War." In a nutshell, the boss came back, and decided we were a failure.

When we are the bosses, think of ANY colonial power, we uniformly F it up.

Even if we were to live outside planet surfaces, where would the resources come from?
Given Ravens and some plant research, do we pretend to know/understand what sentience and awareness are or how they manifest?
Given viruses and prions and gardibears, do we even know what life is?

Our doom will be a little bit of a relief to the universe, I fear.