Antarctica is not "uncolonized" due to a lack of interest; there are relatively few people there because we have collectively agreed not to allow more. If there were no such restrictions, there would be people building tourist hotels all over it, and everything that comes with that.
Mars is disconnected from Earth's biosphere. To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs.
The Mars-Antarctica connection isn't particularly strong.
Not to mention the massive amount of unexploited natural resources below the 80th parallel. There would be huge oil rigs and mining companies all over Antarctica if it were allowed.
> Mars is disconnected from Earth's biosphere. To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs.
I'm sure colons back in the day thought something similar about "the new world". There are so many questions we need to answer first.
How are we going to terraform Mars? What kind of technology are we going to use to change the thermo-chemical properties of an entire planet? What impact is it going to have with its magnetic fields, its gravity, and its orbit? How are humans going to evolve to live there? Slight endocrine disruptors are making people infertile, what would living in another planet cause?
The solar system is an ecological system, just like Earth. Introducing massive changes like that is bound to come back to bite us. This kind of mindset in the past caused tremendous damages to our current ecosystem. Are we really ready to play god with the solar system?
I’m on the fence about astrobiology, but I’ll go out on a limb and say the solar system is not a connected ecosystem “like Earth”.
Any actions we take that ruin parts of the quite likely ecosystem that lives on Mars will have zero effect on Earth’s.
I think a more likely threat is that we may bring something nasty back with a human mission to Mars, as unlike a sample return, you can’t keep the crew and every part of the returning spacecraft in a NASA biocontainment lab indefinitely.
My head canon is that South Park episode [0] were they find out our planet is actually an alien reality show:
> A few billion years ago we realized, "what if we took species from all different planets in the universe, and put them together, on the same planet?" Great TV, right? Asians, bears, ducks, Jews, deer, and Hispanics, all trying to live side by side on one planet! It's great!
> To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs.
I would 100% disagree with that. If you explained to people that Mars was a habitat untouched by humanity, possibly filled with life, most people would absolutely be against anything that would ruin it. People value preserving nature because they find it beautiful, not because they find it useful.
To preserve environments as they exist without (further) human interventions. There are plenty of examples of that right here on Earth, let alone outer space.
Personally, part of me hopes humanity never figures out how to get away from Earth and spread to other planets. An untouched rest of the universe seems far more valuable than one tainted with humans, at least to this particular jaded homo sapien.
> An untouched rest of the universe seems far more valuable than one tainted with humans
This seems like a silly worry given the rate of expansion of the universe. We couldn't "taint" the universe even if we wanted to. At least nothing outside of our galaxy (but more likely outside of just our solar system).
The universe is essentially infinite. With essentially infinite planets, moons, stars, solar systems, and galaxies. Humans are unique (until proven otherwise). I say let the humans have their fun in their 0.000000000000000001% of the universe. In both best and worst case scenarios, there is still plenty of "untainted" universe left.
There are an estimated 10^22 to 10^24 stars, or in the many sextillions range. So really, don't worry, we wouldn't have the capability to taint any significant amount of the universe even if that was our sole purpose.
The point is to not kill everything there. So that, one, it gets to live to become whatever it's going to be, and two, it's still there for us to visit if we can ever figure out how to do so without killing it.
Not only that but there's nobody there bc who tf actually wants to LIVE there? That's why.
But research stations in the poles are exactly why it's useful to have research stations on other planets. It solves the "if only we could..." problem.
As for his other points, microbial contamination can still happen with robots. I definitely agree that we should be sending more robots/rovers out to Mars before we send people as well as experiments like sending something to produce and store oxygen there just so we know it can be done. Hell, the rovers weren't even able to clean their own solar panels - at one point they had the fortune of a dust devil blowing the dust off the panels.
Mars is disconnected from Earth's biosphere. To most people, we wouldn't be ruining anything ecologically important or otherwise sacred by colonising it and bending it to our needs.
The Mars-Antarctica connection isn't particularly strong.