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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.


The Profile


Zanzibar
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. that of my father and his father before him
Location Altadena, CA
School. Other
» More info.
The World









The Link To Zanzibar's Past
This is my page in the beloved art community that my sister got me into:

Samarinda

Extra points for people who know what Samarinda is.
The Phases of the Moon Module
CURRENT MOON
Croc Hunter/Combat Wombat
My hero(s)
Only My Favorite Baseball Player EVER


Aw, Larry Walker, how I loved thee.
The Schedule
M: Science and Exploration
T: Cook a nice dinner
W: PARKOUR!
Th: Parties, movies, dinners
F: Picnics, the Louvre
S: Read books, go for walks, PARKOUR
Su: Philosophy, Religion
The Reading List
This list starts Summer 2006
A Crocodile on the Sandbank
Looking Backwards
Wild Swans
Exodus
1984
Tales of the Alhambra (in progress)
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The Lost Years of Merlin
Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers (in progress)
Atlas Shrugged (in progress)
Uglies
Pretties
Specials
A Long Way Gone (story of a boy soldier in Sierra Leone- met the author! w00t!)
The Eye of the World: Book One of the Wheel of Time
From Magma to Tephra (in progress)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Harry Potter 7
The No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency
Introduction to Planetary Volcanism
A Child Called "It"
Pompeii
Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women?
Americans in Southeast Asia: Roots of Commitment (in progress)
What's So Great About Christianity?
Aeolian Geomorphology
Aeolian Dust and Dust Deposits
The City of Ember
The People of Sparks
Cube Route
When I was in Cuba, I was a German Shepard
Bound
The Golden Compass
Clan of the Cave Bear
The 9/11 Commission Report (2nd time through, graphic novel format this time, ip)
The Incredible Shrinking Man
Twilight
Eclipse
New Moon
Breaking Dawn
Armageddon's Children
The Elves of Cintra
The Gypsy Morph
Animorphs #23: The Pretender
Animorphs #25: The Extreme
Animorphs #26: The Attack
Crucial Conversations
A Journey to the Center of the Earth
A Great and Terrible Beauty
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Dandelion Wine
To Sir, With Love
London Calling
Watership Down
The Invisible
Alice in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The Host
The Hunger Games
Catching Fire
Shadows and Strongholds
The Jungle Book
Beatrice and Virgil
Infidel
Neuromancer
The Help
Flip
Zion Andrews
The Unit
Princess
Quantum Brain
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
No One Ever Told Us We Were Defeated
Delirium
Memento Nora
Robopocalypse
The Name of the Wind
The Terror
Sister
Tao Te Ching
What Paul Meant
Lao Tzu and Taoism
Libyan Sands
Sand and Sandstones
Lost Christianites: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
The Science of God
Calculating God
Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill
City of Bones
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
Divergent
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Old Man and the Sea
Flowers for Algernon
Au Bonheur des Ogres
The Martian
The Road to Serfdom
De La Terre � la Lune (ip)
In the Light of What We Know
Devil in the White City
2312
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
Red Mars
How to Be a Good Wife
A Mote in God's Eye
A Gentleman in Russia
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
Seneca: Letters from a Stoic
The Juanes Module


Juanes just needed his own mod. Who can disagree.
Ethical Question
Sunday. 8.19.07 12:23 am
Ok, so there are two camps among planetary explorers such as myself: we'll call them the "Pussy-Footed Protectors" and the "Soldiers of Fortune".

The people from the Planetary Protection Society are charged with the mission to protect the planets from the advances of humankind and preserve their purity as scientific sites (aka, no nuking the moon!). Take the example of Lake Vostok, for example. Lake Vostok is a gigantic lake that lies miles beneath the Antarctic Ice. It can be seen by ice-penetrating radar, but no one has ever dug down far enough to actually come into contact with the lake. In fact, the lake is under so much ice, that it has been in contact with the surface of the earth for maybe a million years.

There is very likely life down there, as we have found life in every other environment on the earth, and this environment has plentiful liquid water to provide a habitat. However, the forms of life that live in the lake have been separated from all other kinds of life for thousands of years. In normal ecosystems, separations of populations because of physical barriers (think islands) can result in pretty dramatic differences and rapid speciation. The life in Lake Vostok is a gold mine for evolutionary biology... a chance to see how life might have gone differently.

Recently the Russians have developed and employed drilling equipment capable of drilling all the way through the ice and into Lake Vostok. They stopped about 300ft short of penetrating the lake. Why? Because the drill bit isn't sterile. In addition to being dirty from dirt, oil, grease, freon (to keep the hole from freezing) etc, it is guaranteed that the drill bit is contaminated with some kind of organisms from the surface. If these organisms were introduced to Lake Vostok, it's possible that they would proliferate and destroy all of the native species that live there now before anyone got the chance to properly study them. So what does that mean, then? Are we just going to stop and never drill into Lake Vostok to see what happened? Should we just keep drilling, thinking that all in all we'll contaminate the lake only a little bit so a little sacrifice of some of the native life is worth the information we'll get out? Are we ethically bound to respect the life that lives in the lake-- even to the point of never disturbing it at all and thus never knowing?

Right now the plan is to wait on it. Scientists are confident that at some point in the future a method of "clean drilling" will be devised so that the drill bit can be sterilized and can work without pumping freon and aviation fuel down into the hole. This might be done by melting, but we wouldn't really wanting to significantly heat up the lake, either. So the project has been put on hold for an undetermined amount of time. If you recall my long-winded entries on the history of the Rhine, this would be akin to saying, "Let's not try to adjust the flow and course of the river, because we're not very good at hydrological engineering. We should probably just wait until our children or our children's children get better at hydrological engineering and then maybe they can try."

Some people say this might have been a better thing to do, but we'll never know. It's equally possible that the loss of those hundred years of commerce would have made modern-day industrialized Germany completely impossible (i.e., there would have been no coal industry in the Ruhr Valley and German's advanced chemical factories might never have cropped up, taking away the industrial heart of Germany itself!

Lake Vostok is a good Earth analog to Jupiter's moon Europa. Just like Vostok, Europa is thought to have a large body of water that lies beneath an icy shell (though they're still arguing over how thick the shell is). It remains liquid water partially from the pressure of the overlying ice, and partially from geothermal heat, on Europa caused by the way the moon gets flexed and kneaded because of the pull of Jupiter and the passing of its other large moons. One hope of the planetary community is that we can develop and test our instruments on Lake Vostok and then take these instruments with us to Europa. Because if life exists on Europa, it would have been separated from life on Earth for more than one million years. It would have been charting its own course of evolution since the beginning of the Solar System- since the beginning of life itself. The scientists don't want to run the risk of contaminating it, even if that means they'll die before ever knowing if there is life Out There.

So on Mars we're having this little battle because we've figured out that running water once flowed on the Martian surface. Recently some of us have claimed that here or there, depending on conditions, liquid water still runs on the surface. These would be the key places to look for extant life, if it exists at all. In fact, if anything, the places where water could still run today are increasing in number. Recently my advisor contended that a very common feature on parts of Mars is made by seeping liquid water. However, this theory made the Planetary Protectionists very worried. Now they want to designate the entire planet of Mars as a "special region". That means that there is no way that any space craft could land on the red planet without first going through a sterilization process that costs 50 MILLION DOLLARS. Tacked onto the back of sometimes already billion dollars missions, this extra cost makes almost every mission we've planned impossibly expensive.

So basically we'd never get to explore the planet. Ironically we've been searching for life, but just when we think it might be more likely that we could find it, because we think we might be likely to find it, we are no longer allowed to look for it. They're call off the search because they're afraid that we might find what we've always been looking for.

Other people say this: Ok. So here is Mars... it's a random piece of rock floating in space. The only reason it's important is because we're interested in studying it. Why does it matter if there is life on Mars or not if we're not going to find it out? What importance does this random life in the middle of nowhere Milky Way have if nobody ever finds it?

Do we give the potential Martian life its importance, or does all life just inherently have importance, that we should respect? It seems like most godless scientists would say that the life is only really important because we're looking for it. But their are a lot of scientists leading the charge to "protect it". Why? Is it the lovely dovey hippie attitude that many scientists buy into, that life is important for some unknown reason like that we all come from Mother Earth? What is the name of the philosophy that holds that despite a profound disbelief in God that all life forms are still sacred? What authority bestows their equality? How can we even talk about equality when they are all just differently adapted species in the throes of evolution with no significance or cosmic importance at all?

Some of the scientists that see this philosophical inconsistency insist that they only want to protect the planet so that future scientists with more sterile techniques won't find their study areas contaminated by those foolish turn-of-the-century explorers that came first and botched the job (like introducing rabbits to Australia).

Eighteenth-Century-Manifest-Destiny Zanzibar says "Go for it! What's the point of having planets if we don't get to explore them! How much contamination could we possibly bring?? (ans: a lot more than you'd think). God made the universe so that we could explore it and colonize it. Let's TERRAFORM THE great big red S.O.B! (for glory, god and gold and the Virginia Company!)

The other half of me doesn't really care if we find life or not and thinks it doesn't really matter, nor will it change in the least the general way in which she leads her life.

The third half of me recalls how I get angry about stupid archaeologists digging up people's sacred grave sites and throwing their bones all over the place in the name of the scientific search for information and I think that we should just mind our own business for once. But the difference there of course is that we know that those people who are dead were once living creatures, and that they expressly didn't want people to disturb their eternal peace. On Mars we have no idea if this life even exists, and if it does- what if it wants to be found?

Meanwhile we're desperately backtracking and trying to cast doubt upon our own theory so that they'll stop roping off the entire planet and let us go to random boring places, and possibly even send human beings (those filthy, microbe-ridden creatures!) They're still roping off anywhere where we could possibly find life. So we return again to the question: if we can't go to the places where there might be life, why are we going at all? Cheers if you made it through that whole entry. I'd love to know what you think about it, and what deep, fabric-of-the-universe philosophical outlook you are using to inform your decision.
3 Comments.


hrm... very interesting. That explains a lot about what mars conspiracy theorists are talking about these days. The whole "they are blocking out pieces of the planet where there might be life
bits.

I am not exactly 'in the industry' but I sort of think it's almost enough to know that the only life "Out There" is probably microbial (or at very least, little). If you prove that, I can go back to my home and stop worrying about martian invasions. On that same line, it might be good that our multi-cellular selves don't go trasping around on the Mars: the microbes might decide to make something of themselves. Of course, then again, if you've watched Stargate SG-1, you will know that microbes are not the only thing that could be contaminated. Microbes could also contraminate us. What if our puny cellular bodies get ravaged by some alien diesease? AHHH!!!

But that's just me. Besides, Smitty still needs to go into space!
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