Water Found on Mars: Now to Melt It

[LowlyPion]

You saying some undeveloped microorganisms should not be wiped away by a more advanced species happens to be contradictory to Nature's brand of morality.

Actually there is no morality in Nature. That is a human construct.

Just as wanting to think perhaps that mankind is more advanced than other forms of life.

Depending on how you choose to measure, it just may be that a microorganism living naturally on a planet like Mars is more advanced than our DNA which apparently condemns us to hope only at best to be a visitor and even then to eventually long for the day that we can once again return to Earth and go swimming and play softball and eat hot dogs on a warm sunny 4th of July.

You might want to appreciate what there is here before deciding to expend effort to muck it up on other worlds that we are ill suited to live on in the first place.

 

[BoomBoom]

By your logic we would raze the jungles of Africa in favour of land development.

I think we are, or at least we are in South America anyways... :(

 

[DaveC426913]

Just as wanting to think perhaps that mankind is more advanced than other forms of life.

We are. We can make choices above and beyond our own immediate or short-term needs and we can bring resources to bear to do something about it far beyond any individual's needs or ability.

In short, we can decide what we wish to happen to Mars' denizens.

 

[LowlyPion]

In short, we can decide what we wish to happen to Mars' denizens.

As I said it depends on how you choose to measure what advanced happens to mean.

We can certainly choose to be Shiva - Destroyer of Worlds - to the microbes of Mars. Destruction - following entropy's arrow into chaos is always the easier choice to execute.

On the other hand I'd suggest the high maintenance demands of humans, cultivated through eons of evolution on a planet of plenty such as Earth, cannot likely choose to live there on such a world and hope to bring any order on Mars greater than such microbes as may be living there now may. In that regard, their potential talent for breathing life into a planet like Mars, apparently in extremis as to our perceived needs may look considerably more advanced in the final analysis.

And I was so hoping you would be one of the first to sign the Leave Mars for the Martians petition too.

 

[DaveC426913]

As I said it depends on how you choose to measure what advanced happens to mean.

True, but I would argue that we are advanced in a significant way beyond animals (this is our intelligence), if not necessarily mature (this is our wisdom, or lack thereof).

[rhetoric]Perhaps we are the civilisational equivalent of a four-year-old. We have learned that we can act upon the world, bend it to our will, and we wield that power gleefully, but we are just beginning to learn that sometimes we don't know our own strength, and our actions have consequences that, upon reflection, we don't desire.[/rhetoric]