Yes. It's just the same as if you were to smuggle your pet cat or dog, say, into an island with rare species on it which your pet could endanger. It doesn't matter if you built the boat yourself, by hand, from trees you cut down yourself, or floated there on a raft or swum there, or traveled there in a homemade hot air balloon. It's still against the regulations on quarantine and your government is responsible for stopping you from doing that.
If you launch to Mars, it's not just the place you launch from. It's your country of citizenship too. If you are not a citizen of the US and belong to one of the few countries that haven't signed the Outer Space Treaty, shown in red in this map
If you were a citizen of one of those countries, in red, say, Nicaragua, or Costa Rica etc, your country hasn't signed the treaty - but apparently a widely recognized international treaty still has some binding force on you even if your country hasn't signed it. You would need to ask a space lawyer for details there as to how that works.
But at present it's academic anyway because you'd need to use rockets supplied by one of the space faring countries, so they would be responsible, and, say you were from Guatemala, say, but if anyone at all involved in your launch is a citizen of another country, their government gets involved also.
Short of some magical future technology like Cavorite, say, it's not too likely that anyone could launch to Mars without involving citizens of a country that's a signatory of the treaty. In the next few decades anyway - and going by history, if any of those red countries did somehow develop space capability, they'd almost certainly join the treaty and if not would be under a lot of international pressure to do so (as happened with North Korea).
But anyway - would you like to go down in future history as the person who introduced Earth life to Mars? And in the process, either made native Mars life extinct - or created a hybrid jumble of Mars and Earth life (if it has a common origin then it would probably be able to swap DNA fragments via Gene Transfer Agents).
Or even if there is no life there - well it makes things far harder to study a planet without life, if someone introduces life to it. It will be very interesting to find out how Mars works without life, if it doesn't have life there, as so many processes on Earth are intimately tied up with life. And could help us understand exoplanets, how they work and what effect life would have on them.
And potentially also, if there are complex organics there without life - well - it could help fill in gaps in our understanding of what happens on a habitable planet with organics without life. Does life inevitably evolve? Well if Mars has organics without life, then the answer would be no, and we'd then learn what happens instead.
Astrobiologists have exquisitively instruments they want to send to Mars capable of detecting a single amino acid in a sample. For both past and present life searches (both are thought to be likely to be in small numbers and hard to detect, past life because it has deteriorated through cosmic radiation, and present day life because it is basically a cold desert landscape).
Think about what introducing Earth life to the planet would do to those experiments.
So far everyone who has any plans for sending humans to Mars has said they plan to keep to provisions of the Outer Space Treaty to prevent contamination of Mars. Those provisions are interpreted by COSPAR, so final decision as to whether an expedition risks introducing life to Mars would depend on them - an international group of scientists that meets every two years. They draw up the guidelines - then individual countries apply them.
In practice in the US this is done through the NASA Office of Planetary Protection. So, if you are a US citizen, they would be the first people to contact, if you had any plans like this, and they would work with you closely as the situation develops. We have a planetary protection officer in the EU also, and not sure what system is used by Russia, China and India, obvious thing to do is to contact your country's space agency and take it from there. That is if this ever was possible :).
If we can't visit Mars surface with humans in person, or not yet, then we can surely send humans to Mars orbit, if this is done with care so there is no risk of contaminating the planet itself - and probably also to its moons Phobos and Deimos. And then explore the surface remotely using robots. Like this one
One big step for man as astronaut controls robot from ISS
This is very similar to the situation in Antarctica, where scientists can't send humans down to examine the subsurface lakes there in person - isolated from the surface from millions of years. Because we don't yet have a way to do that without risk of introducing present day surface life to the habitats.
But gradually, with care, they are using other methods to explore them, remotely.
See also my To Explore Mars With Likes Of Occulus Rift & Virtuix Omni - From Mars Capture Orbit, Phobos Or Deimos
If you launch to Mars, it's not just the place you launch from. It's your country of citizenship too. If you are not a citizen of the US and belong to one of the few countries that haven't signed the Outer Space Treaty, shown in red in this map
Outer Space Treaty parties in green, signatories (not yet ratified) in yellow, non signatories in red.
All space faring and aspiring space faring countries have signed it now, including North Korea.
If you were a citizen of one of those countries, in red, say, Nicaragua, or Costa Rica etc, your country hasn't signed the treaty - but apparently a widely recognized international treaty still has some binding force on you even if your country hasn't signed it. You would need to ask a space lawyer for details there as to how that works.
But at present it's academic anyway because you'd need to use rockets supplied by one of the space faring countries, so they would be responsible, and, say you were from Guatemala, say, but if anyone at all involved in your launch is a citizen of another country, their government gets involved also.
Short of some magical future technology like Cavorite, say, it's not too likely that anyone could launch to Mars without involving citizens of a country that's a signatory of the treaty. In the next few decades anyway - and going by history, if any of those red countries did somehow develop space capability, they'd almost certainly join the treaty and if not would be under a lot of international pressure to do so (as happened with North Korea).
But anyway - would you like to go down in future history as the person who introduced Earth life to Mars? And in the process, either made native Mars life extinct - or created a hybrid jumble of Mars and Earth life (if it has a common origin then it would probably be able to swap DNA fragments via Gene Transfer Agents).
Or even if there is no life there - well it makes things far harder to study a planet without life, if someone introduces life to it. It will be very interesting to find out how Mars works without life, if it doesn't have life there, as so many processes on Earth are intimately tied up with life. And could help us understand exoplanets, how they work and what effect life would have on them.
And potentially also, if there are complex organics there without life - well - it could help fill in gaps in our understanding of what happens on a habitable planet with organics without life. Does life inevitably evolve? Well if Mars has organics without life, then the answer would be no, and we'd then learn what happens instead.
Astrobiologists have exquisitively instruments they want to send to Mars capable of detecting a single amino acid in a sample. For both past and present life searches (both are thought to be likely to be in small numbers and hard to detect, past life because it has deteriorated through cosmic radiation, and present day life because it is basically a cold desert landscape).
Think about what introducing Earth life to the planet would do to those experiments.
So far everyone who has any plans for sending humans to Mars has said they plan to keep to provisions of the Outer Space Treaty to prevent contamination of Mars. Those provisions are interpreted by COSPAR, so final decision as to whether an expedition risks introducing life to Mars would depend on them - an international group of scientists that meets every two years. They draw up the guidelines - then individual countries apply them.
In practice in the US this is done through the NASA Office of Planetary Protection. So, if you are a US citizen, they would be the first people to contact, if you had any plans like this, and they would work with you closely as the situation develops. We have a planetary protection officer in the EU also, and not sure what system is used by Russia, China and India, obvious thing to do is to contact your country's space agency and take it from there. That is if this ever was possible :).
If we can't visit Mars surface with humans in person, or not yet, then we can surely send humans to Mars orbit, if this is done with care so there is no risk of contaminating the planet itself - and probably also to its moons Phobos and Deimos. And then explore the surface remotely using robots. Like this one
This is very similar to the situation in Antarctica, where scientists can't send humans down to examine the subsurface lakes there in person - isolated from the surface from millions of years. Because we don't yet have a way to do that without risk of introducing present day surface life to the habitats.
But gradually, with care, they are using other methods to explore them, remotely.
See also my To Explore Mars With Likes Of Occulus Rift & Virtuix Omni - From Mars Capture Orbit, Phobos Or Deimos
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
4.8m answer views110.3k this month
Top Writer2017, 2016, and 2015
Published WriterHuffPost, Slate, and 4 moreHuffPost, Slate, Forbes, Newsweek, Business Insider, and Science 2.0