They talk about "Washington Law Enforcement" but it's really just a county sheriff office. I'm from Clark County, WA. They're not exactly "in the know" so this may have been an assumption.

https://gizmodo.com/decolonizing-mars-are-we-thinking-about-space-explorat-1830348568

As if there was any question that "Green" movements are nothing more than anti-human movements, they already want to save mars

(to be fair, it's not nearly as bad an article as that. But it is gizmodo)

There's a viable argument to be made that we're actually all Martians

No.

My point here is to say that we may have every right to that planet

>.>

Remember, what i am referring to is microbial transport on meteors. An ELE level asteroid strikes Mars and kicks up all sorts of stuff into space. On some of those rocks life in the form of simple spores or the like manages to hang out. That rock hits Earth billions of years ago and voila, that life then spreads on Earth. Or vice versa, we could find that Martian life, if it exists, started here. We may never be able to tell which is which.

We should make a serious effort to look for signs of life on Mars before we stop being careful of contaminating the planet. If we make a serious effort and find none, we let loose. If we find microscopic life and it is the same of Earth's based nucleic acid scheme, we let loose. If we find it's radically different, we catalog it and study it...and let loose.

Ultimately I don't see us going hands off on a world for some microorganisms

On the other hand, there are some interesting points to be made about who ends up "owning" Mars. It's a lot more difficult to cross interstellar space than it is the Atlantic. Governments and billionaires currently will govern who goes and what gets established there. I think now is a good time to be discussing how much right they will have over who goes. What will that mean for liberties? Will people have to indenture themselves to pay for passage, becoming essentially slaves to the initial settlers and rich sponsors?

Now THOSE are the real questions about Martial equality in my mind

And lots of sci-fi takes on this general theme

For good reason

the problem is mars doesn't really have much of an atmosphere in comparision to earth.

it's about a hundred times thinner, meaning that the sun's rays beat on it much harder. Think of the ultra violet rays that strike our planet, and then consider them being a hundred times more powerful.

True, but if we are patient it looks like there are the necessarily resources to terraform it. It'll just take a thousand year.

not much at all could survive that.

Genetic modification, baby!

meaning there's not really any life to be found on mars.

only remnants of it

Then we put life there, starting with microbes and plants.

so no, we shouldn't look for life on mars, because we won't find any.

We'll make our own life there.

We may actually find life. Microbes in some places, But i'm kinda betting it'll look like primitive Earth microbiota.

it's not feasibly possible for something like that to exist on a planet without atmospheric protection against the violent rays of the sun

It is if it's underground or in shaded places. Or the poles where the suns rays are oblique.

That's also where the water likely exists

it would have to be miles under the surface.

radiation would leak pretty far in, as well as heat.

Meters would likely suffice, or less in shaded places or the poles. I think it's worth exploring with robots before we send people. It'll be about 15 years before we send people so make use of the time.

I like the robot probes, anyway. My biggest philanthropic beneficiary is the Planetary Society. They actually fund things like solar sails and instruments on NASA, ESA, and JSA probes.

@Grenade123 just read it. Full of npc garbage.

As far as we know, there's no life to displace on mars in the first place (Besides very small lifeforms perhaps). As for its environment, it's currently inhospitable and couldn't get much worse for supporting life, let alone intelligent life.

That article reads like absolute trash

We need to decolonize the sciences, says the Afro woman, quick call the witch doctors. We need lightning.

Lol

From the article: "But I’m disturbed by the way people talk about going to Mars as if the planet is ours..."

Who's is it exactly then? It sounds like this person has conceptualized an idea of intelligent life on mars without any evidence for such an idea. I don't think microbes are very concerned with much, let alone what we do on mars

Until some other civilization claims the planet as their own, there isn't much stopping anyone from claiming mars as their own. These people sound worried about a microbe genocide. I don't think we can make smallpox blankets that small though

Mars is mine