No, rather the opposite. We take a lot of care to make sure we don't send any lifeforms to other places in the solar system. This is mandated in the "Outer Space Treaty" which all the space faring nations have signed.
The main places we need to protect in this way are Mars, Europa and Encladus.
Other places need some protection also though. We don't know for sure, for instance, if there is life on the small asteroid Ceres. It is unlikely perhaps - but we have found so many potential habitats for life in unusual places that we can't rule it out yet. Who knows if Ceres might have an underground reservoir of water and occasional "water volcanoes"?
Some places are not an issue at all for life. The Moon for instance, we don't think there is any habitat on the Moon where life could reproduce, Earth life anyway. So the main issue there is just contamination in a more ordinary sense, whether we introduce contaminants to the surface that might confuse later scientific study. The lunar "atmosphere" is particularly vulnerable for instance, because it is so thin. Ice at the poles might need some care also.
And - it's the same on the Earth also. Mainly for higher lifeforms at present. So - you are not permitted to introduce rats, or cats or cane toads etc to islands of biological intereset that never had them, and when that has happened accidentally, often have to go to a great deal of trouble to reverse the contamination.
It's not so common for microbes. But - visitors to Antarctica have to clean their boots before they land. It is partly to reduce risk of introducing small creatures and plants. But also, to preserve the native population of microbes as well. So that scientists can study it in its original state.
And in the case of Lake Vostok - this is a lake beneath a thick layer of ice, no contact with the surface for millions of years, we think. All you can see from the surface is a rather flat area of ice. So the scientists studying these lakes (there are several of them in Antarctica) - they take particular care not to introduce modern life to them.
It would be fairly easy with our modern technology to just melt through the ice, drop a submarine into the lake, and start exploring it. But instead the Russians stopped just short of the water layer, for many years, as they tried to work out ways to drill down into it without contaminating it.
And when they eventually did drill through, and found traces of many interesting lifeforms in the water that surged back up (before it froze and sealed it shut again) - there was a fair bit of controversy about whether the lifeforms they found really are indigenous to Lake Vostok or whether perhaps they didn't take adequate sterilization measures.
So - it is the same for Mars, but even more so. We have no idea if there is life there. Some think that it is possible that some relatively modern forms of life might have made the transit to Mars, perhaps as recently as the end of the dinosaur era, in giant impacts on Earth that send material, some of it, as far as Mars.
So - it may have some relatively modern forms of life, as in, diverged from Earth only a few tens of millions of years ago. Or it may have ancient forms of life. Perhaps so ancient that we no longer have any traces of them on Earth.
Or it may have indigenous life that evolved there but never made the transit to Earth. Or a mixture of all three.
Or could be that there is no life there. But there might then be "prebiotic chemistry". Things like - scientists have hypothesized that DNA and RNA and other complex chemicals like that could form before life evolved, the so called "RNA world" hypothesis". Others think that the metabolism came first, so we had things that looked like modern cells to some extent, with a metabolism, able to eat etc, but not able to reproduce perfectly. So could be a "metabolism without life".
Whatever, there is almost bound to be some evidence of complex chemistry. And we expected to find organics already before Curiosity did, because they are delivered to Mars in comets and meteorites. So - if there is no life on Mars - what happens to all those organics on a lifeless planet? That is equally fascinating, and the last thing you want to do is to introduce life to a lifeless planet capable of hosting life - when that's one of the most interesting questions you could ask in biology.
Whatever is there, we want to know what it is first, before we make any decisions about what to do next.
The last thing the scientists want to do at this stage, is to introduce a bunch of Earth microbes to Mars and other lifeforms.
Because - if you introduce life to another planet that is not native to it - how could you ever remove it again? We know how hard it is to remove cane toads or rabbits from Australia. Imagine trying to remove modern halobacteria from Mars (the bacteria, or more properly "archaea" that turns the Red Sea a purplish red - some varieties of it are amongst the most Mars hardy of the lifeforms we have on Earth).
It could never be reversed, not with present day technology and quite probably never with any future technology either.
There aren't many habitats for life on Mars we think - life there is far harder than on Earth - but - there may be a few droplets of water here and there - on salt / ice interfaces, or due to solid state greenhouse effect etc. If some Earth microbe infected these habitats, it could gradually spread from one to another - and the global duststorms would spread the spores and other dormant states of microbes throughout Mars. That could never be reversed, if it got to that state.
And the biggest anticlimax we could have to our biological investigation of Mars would be to discover life there, just to find out - that it is life that we brought to the planet ourselves.
What we can do though - is to introduce life to enclosed habitats in space. We could make entire closed ecosystems in space in Stanford Torus type habitats. That's got nothing by way of planetary protection issues. And could tell us a lot about ecosystems and biology and so forth.
And we can introduce higher lifeforms to Mars, plants at least.
You could grow a rose on Mars, in a greenhouse, so long as you make sure the seed is sterilized and grow it in sterile hydroponics. There are two kinds of hydroponics, the "friendly microbes" version and the "sterile hydroponics" which doesn't use any microbes at all. Instead you supply the plant directly with all the chemicals it needs.
That is compatible with planetary protection, because there is no way that a rose is going to be able to grow in the wild outside your greenhouse on Mars. Trees also, tomato plants or whatever. All that is no problem so long as you don't have any microbes or lichens or such like involved that could potentially reproduce on Mars. What you'd do is to sterilize the seeds, and grow several generations of seeds in sterile hydroponics, and then once totally sure that your seeds don't have even a single microbe, you could then send them to Mars or wherever you want.
Sadly humans can't be sterilized in this way - we'd die if you removed all microbes.
The main places we need to protect in this way are Mars, Europa and Encladus.
Other places need some protection also though. We don't know for sure, for instance, if there is life on the small asteroid Ceres. It is unlikely perhaps - but we have found so many potential habitats for life in unusual places that we can't rule it out yet. Who knows if Ceres might have an underground reservoir of water and occasional "water volcanoes"?
Some places are not an issue at all for life. The Moon for instance, we don't think there is any habitat on the Moon where life could reproduce, Earth life anyway. So the main issue there is just contamination in a more ordinary sense, whether we introduce contaminants to the surface that might confuse later scientific study. The lunar "atmosphere" is particularly vulnerable for instance, because it is so thin. Ice at the poles might need some care also.
And - it's the same on the Earth also. Mainly for higher lifeforms at present. So - you are not permitted to introduce rats, or cats or cane toads etc to islands of biological intereset that never had them, and when that has happened accidentally, often have to go to a great deal of trouble to reverse the contamination.
It's not so common for microbes. But - visitors to Antarctica have to clean their boots before they land. It is partly to reduce risk of introducing small creatures and plants. But also, to preserve the native population of microbes as well. So that scientists can study it in its original state.
And in the case of Lake Vostok - this is a lake beneath a thick layer of ice, no contact with the surface for millions of years, we think. All you can see from the surface is a rather flat area of ice. So the scientists studying these lakes (there are several of them in Antarctica) - they take particular care not to introduce modern life to them.
It would be fairly easy with our modern technology to just melt through the ice, drop a submarine into the lake, and start exploring it. But instead the Russians stopped just short of the water layer, for many years, as they tried to work out ways to drill down into it without contaminating it.
And when they eventually did drill through, and found traces of many interesting lifeforms in the water that surged back up (before it froze and sealed it shut again) - there was a fair bit of controversy about whether the lifeforms they found really are indigenous to Lake Vostok or whether perhaps they didn't take adequate sterilization measures.
So - it is the same for Mars, but even more so. We have no idea if there is life there. Some think that it is possible that some relatively modern forms of life might have made the transit to Mars, perhaps as recently as the end of the dinosaur era, in giant impacts on Earth that send material, some of it, as far as Mars.
So - it may have some relatively modern forms of life, as in, diverged from Earth only a few tens of millions of years ago. Or it may have ancient forms of life. Perhaps so ancient that we no longer have any traces of them on Earth.
Or it may have indigenous life that evolved there but never made the transit to Earth. Or a mixture of all three.
Or could be that there is no life there. But there might then be "prebiotic chemistry". Things like - scientists have hypothesized that DNA and RNA and other complex chemicals like that could form before life evolved, the so called "RNA world" hypothesis". Others think that the metabolism came first, so we had things that looked like modern cells to some extent, with a metabolism, able to eat etc, but not able to reproduce perfectly. So could be a "metabolism without life".
Whatever, there is almost bound to be some evidence of complex chemistry. And we expected to find organics already before Curiosity did, because they are delivered to Mars in comets and meteorites. So - if there is no life on Mars - what happens to all those organics on a lifeless planet? That is equally fascinating, and the last thing you want to do is to introduce life to a lifeless planet capable of hosting life - when that's one of the most interesting questions you could ask in biology.
Whatever is there, we want to know what it is first, before we make any decisions about what to do next.
The last thing the scientists want to do at this stage, is to introduce a bunch of Earth microbes to Mars and other lifeforms.
Because - if you introduce life to another planet that is not native to it - how could you ever remove it again? We know how hard it is to remove cane toads or rabbits from Australia. Imagine trying to remove modern halobacteria from Mars (the bacteria, or more properly "archaea" that turns the Red Sea a purplish red - some varieties of it are amongst the most Mars hardy of the lifeforms we have on Earth).
It could never be reversed, not with present day technology and quite probably never with any future technology either.
There aren't many habitats for life on Mars we think - life there is far harder than on Earth - but - there may be a few droplets of water here and there - on salt / ice interfaces, or due to solid state greenhouse effect etc. If some Earth microbe infected these habitats, it could gradually spread from one to another - and the global duststorms would spread the spores and other dormant states of microbes throughout Mars. That could never be reversed, if it got to that state.
And the biggest anticlimax we could have to our biological investigation of Mars would be to discover life there, just to find out - that it is life that we brought to the planet ourselves.
What we can do though - is to introduce life to enclosed habitats in space. We could make entire closed ecosystems in space in Stanford Torus type habitats. That's got nothing by way of planetary protection issues. And could tell us a lot about ecosystems and biology and so forth.
And we can introduce higher lifeforms to Mars, plants at least.
You could grow a rose on Mars, in a greenhouse, so long as you make sure the seed is sterilized and grow it in sterile hydroponics. There are two kinds of hydroponics, the "friendly microbes" version and the "sterile hydroponics" which doesn't use any microbes at all. Instead you supply the plant directly with all the chemicals it needs.
That is compatible with planetary protection, because there is no way that a rose is going to be able to grow in the wild outside your greenhouse on Mars. Trees also, tomato plants or whatever. All that is no problem so long as you don't have any microbes or lichens or such like involved that could potentially reproduce on Mars. What you'd do is to sterilize the seeds, and grow several generations of seeds in sterile hydroponics, and then once totally sure that your seeds don't have even a single microbe, you could then send them to Mars or wherever you want.
Sadly humans can't be sterilized in this way - we'd die if you removed all microbes.
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
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