Reds Versus Greens

Great Debates
1

In his Mars trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson provided some fodder for debate. Briefly, it boils down to Reds versus Greens, i.e., those who favor the maintenance of Mars in its pristine state versus those who favor terraforming it. The debate itself is a lot more interesting than the books, with their one-dimensional Ayn Randish personalities and their far-fetched plot premises. I don’t want to debate the books or the details with which they treat the problem, but rather the problem itself.

There are multiple factes of debate:

[li]Scientific considerations[/li]
Is terraforming Mars even possible or practical? On earth, the ecology is such a delicate and complex balance of spontaneous order that the extinction of even one species can cause unpredictable ripples throughout the environment. Can science effectively create an ecology on a planetary scale that will be self-sufficient?

Will the horse bite the hand that feeds it? Assuming that science is able to create an oxygen rich atmosphere in which man can survive and that natural selection will apply on Mars, can an environment emerge that is so hostile to man that he will find he has created a Frankenstein? Will creatures evolve who eat men or give men incurable diseases? Will man “fit” into his new creation?

If there is already microscopic life on Mars, will terraforming destroy it? And if it does, will there be any negative ecological effects? Can Martian gravity hold a sufficiently dense atmosphere to which man can successfully adapt?

How much havoc will the solar system itself wreak on Martian colonies? What will happen when micrometeors hit plastic domes like hypersonic bullets? What will happen when Martian shrapnel showers the habitats and factories in one of the many violent Martian wind storms?

[li]Ethical considerations[/li]
Is colonization itself unethical? Is there some ethical principal that gives man the right to invade an environment and form it to suit himself? If existing Martian life is destroyed by terraforming, is that a bad thing? Will man have interfered in an evolution that might have taken place without him?

[li]Political considerations[/li]
This is probably the most complex debate. Who will call the many shots to be called? Private enterprise? Government? Who holds the deed to Mars? Can governments declare eminent domain over Martian territory? If so, which ones?

Who will pay for terraforming and by what justification? Will those who provide the blood, sweat, and capital be allowed to own what they have improved, or will politicians step in after the hard work is over and stake their claims?

Will Redpeace send saboteurs to throw a monkey-wrench in the works? Will present-day environmentalists be the ones in favor of terraforming or the ones opposed to it? [!!!]

Can governments maintain multi-generational projects such as the thousand-year terraforming of Mars? What happens if the process is begun and then abandoned, the way America abandoned exploration of the Moon?

Will a Martian war with Earth be inevitable? Will colonists, tired of interference from people thous… er millions of miles away, rebel and declare their independence? Can governments on earth effectively control colonies on Mars?

Feel free to debate any or all of the aspects above or ones of your own. I’ll tell how I see it in the first response post.

2

I think that an attempt to terraform Mars will be made by government, whose outlook and insight is historically notoriously naive. I think that, like so many things in the past, the project itself will evolve into the justification for further action. Though I believe that the sensible thing to do is let Spontaneous Order rule the day, I don’t think governments can restrain themselves from getting involved in anything popular. Thus, I see the Martian Terraforming Project as eventually requiring a far more authoritarian governance than even the one we endure today.

I can see where eventually even slave labor, by genetically engineered workers, will be justified by citing the needs of the Project. But I also believe that the fundamental nature of man’s spirit will not change much and that, eventually, the Martians will rebel and there will be an inter-planetary war.

I think that present-day environmentalist extremists will morph into the Reds, and will sabotage rocket launches and other processes that are essential to the Project. Some will infiltrate the Martian colonies as kamakazi saboteurs. I think there is no guarantee whatsoever that the newly terraformed environment will even be amenable to man. I think the ends are so unpredicatable that they will be nothing like the naive notions that began working toward them.

I guess all that makes me a skeptic. So I’ll say that if private enterprise is allowed to take on the project without interference, I’m a Green. Otherwise, I’m a Red.

3

I just liked the fact that the Mars government could spend decades on an elevator to the stars and a few well placed explosives had it toppling down in a matter of hours.
And that is one of the biggest consideration. To do anything “positive” (terraforming), could take hundreds of years. To counteract that might just take one well placed bomb by the right crazed individual.

As far as ethical considerations…I don’t think it will be that much of an ethical consideration. When people on Earth go about destroying Earth and its species, why would a few microbes and maybe a lichen or two on an alien planet make much difference? If we can find a way to live harmoniously with them, well, more power to everyone. When it comes down to either them or us, I’d venture to guess most humans will choose us.

I agree that political problems will be the most difficult to overcome. I suppose an argument can be made of “we’ve got the technology to get to Mars, so we’ll claim it for ourselves and lets see what you can do about it.” Or perhaps we can send the right over to the UN and watch as nothing gets accomplished. Too many cooks…

I’m not sure, but I think the UN already lays claim to all the planets. I know that some agency does.

This isn’t the most intelligent of answers, but it’s 8:20 in the morning

4

No country or organization can claim a planet. The Outer Space Treaty states:

'Course, as was made obvious in the Mars trilogy, treaties can be broken, revised, revoked, folded, spindled, and mutilated.

On terraforming: I actually found myself sympathising quite a bit with the geologist (Kate, was it?) who felt that the face of Mars shouldn’t have been altered by terraforming, not because of the phantom chance that there might be life, but because the landscape of Mars is unique and should be perserved and studied.

If native martian lifeforms were exterminated it would be an incalculable loss to science, because one of the huge problems with understanding biogenesis and evolution is that we only have one system to study. However, there would have to come a point when the surface of Mars was thoroughly explored and enough likely subsurface cites had been investigated, so that we could say with a reasonable degree of certainty that there was no life there. But would we ever know enough about martian geology to justify razing it? There’s a whole planet to explore that’s like Earth in many ways, but wholly unlike Earth in other ways. I think that, from a purely scientific standpoint, terraforming Mars’ surface would be a tragedy to the study of geology, in the same way (though perhaps to a lesser degree) that destroying martian life would be a tragedy to biology.

If terraforming Mars were practical, I can’t see it happening as Robinson described. I blanched several times while reading when someone said, “What if X happens as a consequence of this action we’re taking?” and Sax just shrugged and said, “We’ll do something else and fix it then.” I thought that was an unrealistically cavalier attitude when you’re talking about changing the climate of an entire planet. We just don’t know that much–and we won’t for centuries, if ever.

5

If Mars has an existing biosphere, then it would be wrong to terraform it, since the scientific value of that biosphere would be literally incalculable.

At the present time we have absolutely no knowledge of what extraterrestrial life might be like. Finding examples on Mars would be a scientific breakthrough on the order of Galileo, Newton, or Darwin, or perhaps greater. Of course there’s no way to determine how scientifically useful martian life might be, but it would be immense.

We wouldn’t just brush aside lichens and bacteria if they were extraterrestrial. Maybe after a hundred years of study we might decide that we could terraform Mars, but not until then.

If there is no Martian biosphere then terraforming it presents no ethical problems whatsoever. However, it would take decades of study to prove that Mars has no biosphere.

But even so, terraforming an entire planet is likely to be extremely cost-ineffective. People will live in space, but they will live in habitats. Wasting volatiles by dumping them on Mars will likely be frowned on.

6

Like Dale from King of the Hill says, “Earth first! Make Mars our bitch!”

First of all, by the time we get up the gumption to start terraforming Mars, Earth will no doubt be so crowded with people and polluted that most people won’t care about any things unique to Mars. They’ll want open space, clean air and water.

Second, if there is some form of life on Mars, we have no idea what its make-up might be or if it could survive under Earth-like conditions. It might do very well in an oxygen atmosphere. Then again, it might not.

Third, we have no idea of what kind of time table it might take to terraform Mars. We can speculate all we want, but until we actually attempt it, we won’t know. The guesses being made currently cannot take into account sudden technological innovation. If you travelled back to 1932 and showed Einstein, Bohr, and other top scientists of the time period a modern computer (or hell, even a pocket calculator!) they’d be hard pressed to believe that it came from a mere 70 years in the future. Had you told Kennedy at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis that the Soviet Union would be falling apart 30 years later, he’d think you were crazy.

All of this is assuming that Earth’s political and business leaders are intelligent enough to see the value of spending the huge sums of money that will no doubt be necessary to undertake such a task. That, is going to take some doing, and I’m not convinced anyone’ll be able to do that.

7

I think that eventually, private enterprise will have to step in and send a mission to Mars. It wll create competition with the government, just like what happened with Human Genome Project. I think that probably some rich crackpot will decide that he really wants to finance the first mission to Mars (maybe he’ll even want to go there himself), and will pay for it entirely or mostly from his own money. Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could probably afford to start constructing a Mars mission right now.

When will we start moving large numbers of people to Mars and form permanent colonies? It depends on conditions here on Earth. If global warming start proceeding too quickly and the coastlines go underwater, the demand for prime real estate will go up, making permanent Mars colonies more profitable. I don’t think that there can be any real colonization until people are able to make money off it.

This is how I see property rights developing on Mars: the ITF or some future trade organization decrees that anybodys who lands at a particular point on Mars can claim all the property within a certain radius of the landing site. They then may sell the property at any price they choose, or there may be price caps, I don’t know. Anyway, a few major corporations will probably race to Mars and claim most of the planet, after which they would sell small pieces of it to private owners. Various governments or the entire world might also try to preserve part of the planet in its pristine shape for scientific research. Also, some corporations would probably keep some parts of Mars unspoiled and use them as tourist destination for rich “Earthies”.

8

On to Europa :wink:

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/europa.html

9

A couple years back an article on terraforming appeared in the journal Environmental Ethics. In this article, Robert Sparrow, (an Australian political philosopher BTW) opined that terraforming is unethical on two fronts–neither exclusively environmental. On the one hand, Sparrow suggests that terraforming is an afront to aesthetic sensitivity. IOW “destroying the unique natural landscape of an entire planet to turn it to our own purposes reveals us to be vandals and brutes. It shows that we lead impoverished lives, being unable to respond appropriately to the beauty which is inthe world (and on other worlds) around us” (p. 233). Sparrow’s second critique is on the sin of hubris. He believes that this level of arrogance/pride represents a false optimism that overlooks the potentials for wide-scale disaster.

A brief note–Sparrow’s treatment of terraforming begins and ends with a virtue based ethical perspective. As such, he is not concerned with intrinsic/inherent rights. His condemnation of terraforming follows from the vices it would produce in humans–making us brutish and prideful.

Sparrow, Robert. 1999. The ethics of terraforming. Environmental Ethics (21)3: 227-245.

10

Everybody knows reds are better. I mean, sure, as a kid, I craved the greens like everybody else, but that was because they’d stopped making the reds after the dye scare. And in high school the other kids claimed greens made you horny, but since when does a teenager need help to get horny? No, reds all the way. They are the king of candy. They are the… what?

Never mind.

11

Terraforming is nothing more than what we have been doing to our own planet, but on a grander scale.

Can we terraform Mars? Perhaps not today, but assuming that our scientific knowledge and technical capabilities keeps increasing at a reasonable rate, eventually we will be able to do so. I do not see any reason to suppose that a “Frankenstein” situation will develop, or at least no more likely to happen than here on earth.

If life (microscopic or otherwise) exists on Mars, this will set up a natural resistance to any global terraforming efforts. By this I mean there will be factions here on earth that will take up the cause of the indigenous Mars life, and they will be able to hold off any efforts to eradicate the biosphere until the opposing justification is too great. Of course by then, we will have established Martian “zoos” to preserve this environment and allow us to continue to learn from it.

I don’t pretend to be able to debate the ethics of any of this, but I would like to point out one thing. In questioning whether man is affecting evolution that would have taken place without him, you are inherently setting man apart from nature. Man is a part of nature and evolution, so whatever happens is just nature taking its course. It just so happens that I believe the natural evolution of life includes Man spreading throughout the galaxy.

Will a Martian war with Earth be inevitable? I think the desire of people to choose their own destiny is irrepressible, so eventually independence must be achieved. Hopefully, in this far-flung future scenario, “war” will have a different connotation, and will be decided by words and ideas, not violence and death.

12

At what point are we not vandals, i.e. what if we just alter half of a planet, or a fourth, or just our own front yards? If you go far enough down, anyone who mows their lawn is a brute and a vandal. Humans alter the environment by just existing, so his argument is fundamentally flawed. The other argument of hubris won’t convince most people, either. We got problems with what we are doing to the environment on Earth, i don’t think anyone will care about possible phantom consequences on Mars, especially when they can live in pressure domes anyway. By the time we get to Mars, we will know so much more about this subject, that we will be able to make a more informed choice as to whether their will be terraforming.
oh, and flodnak, remember, the greens let you hit the ball downtown, while the oranges were only a triple…

13

so maybe the question has already been answered, but isn’t mars further out from the sun then the earth?
i mean, if we can’t grow vegetables on the north pole, then how can we terraform mars?
the north pole already has an atmosphere and water…isn’t that what mars would be like…only a lot colder?
if the answer is eclosed systems, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to just make those in space instead of on mars?
it just doens’t seem to make any sense to me.
however,i do agree with this:
>First of all, by the time we get up the gumption to start terraforming Mars, Earth will no doubt be so crowded with people and polluted that most people won’t care about any things unique to Mars. They’ll want open space, clean air and water<

14

Libertarian wrote:

<nitpick>

Frankenstein was the good doctor’s last name. His creation is usually referred to as “Frankenstein’s Monster.”

But I’m sure you knew that, and were just going for brevity.

</nitpick>

15

IIRC, the monster’s name was Adam, but i am at work in St. Louis, and my book is in Rock Island, IL, so i could be wrong.

16

Bigfitty

Welcome to the boards. The issues we’re discussing come from the books Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars written by Kim Stanley Robinson.

You don’t have to have read the books to participate in this. The concept itself was what the books were based off of, but the ideas of colonizing Mars are more varied and complicated than even the books could go into.

Here’s a short summary: Mars is being colonized. Some people think it’s bad (Reds). Some people think it’s good (Greens).

From there, you’re on your own. The idea here is not what we can do now, but what is possible to do in future. And, as far as growing things in Antarctica, it is possible to do. People live there now and they have an ecosystem set up. It’s not Busch gardens, but what are ya gonna do?

[sub]I wonder if I could use any more vB in this post[/sub]

17

Thanks enderw24…these are real interesting boards.
i just looked up the vb and smile codes…i don’t understand a few ;j , but here goes…

are you talking about the research camps or the eskimos? (inuit?)I’ve never heard of an ecosystem, except fungus at either of the poles and they are much closer to the sun then mars is. Plus i think the fact that earth still has a molten core and is actively spewing huge amounts of whatever it is that volcanoes spew has some sort of effect on the livabilty(sp?) of our planet. would you duplicate that with huge reactors or something? I mean, where will the heat come from?

from what i can see, it just wouldn’t be practical. it would be much easier to build habitats in space. i realize that’s just one of the questions, but it’s the lichpin that i focused on.

18

Darn it! I thought this was going to be a debate about commues vs. the Green Party. Well, I can see this is not my element…carry on…

19

It seems to me that the environmental dangers are formidable. There are the notorious wind/dust storms, brutal ultra-violet radiation, micrometeors that wouldn’t make it through earth’s atmosphere, and dangerous chemicals even in the very rocks. It is easy to imagine that, as a Martian colonist, you would be forever mindful of what little separates you from sudden disaster or death. This is a lot more severe risk than earth colonizers have experienced. They faced danger, yes, from hostile environments in the sense that aboriginal peoples, critters, and diseases could do them in. But they did not face sudden suffocation just because a rock hit their window.

20

Bigfitty,

I’m talking not of the Eskimos (thought the same could apply to them), but of the scientists in Antarctica who have developed limited ecosystems of their own. It’s indoors, of course, and the same would happen on Mars…for awhile.

You see, Mars is as darn near unlivable as you can make it right now. The barest of atmospheres, freezing temperatures (it’s not the lack of heat, it’s the lack of humidity…), no apparent native life, and radiation galore, makes Mars about as unfriendly a planet as they come. That’s where teraforming comes in. Over the course of decades, perhaps even centuries, we can (hypothetically) build up the atmosphere of Mars to a nice breathable mixture of Oxygen plus CO[sub]2[/sub], N, and H. At the same time we can introduce plant life into the ecosystem to speed up the process and help stabilize the temperature a bit. But until that happens, we live inside buildings all the time.

The question now is: if we can, does that mean we should? What if there’s life on Mars? Forget about three eyed green Martians, I’m saying what if there’s ANY life on Mars? Should we destroy it to allow us to live there? And if there is no life, does that still give us the right to change a completely untouched planet just to suit our purposes? What about the research that can be accomplished by NOT changing things?
And who, ultimately, makes these decisions?

This isn’t as much speculation as you’d think. NASA’s next big project is to land a team on Mars. They hope to do it in the next 20 years. I think it can come much sooner than that. When that happens, well…we can’t go backwards is all I’m saying. We need to have thought these things out in advance.