Whenever someone waxes poetic about planetary engineering, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the ethical implications.
This story originally featured on the MIT Press Reader. Exploration, habitation, and resource extraction all carry a risk of inflicting environmental damage in space, just as they do here on Earth. But some futurists and space settlement enthusiasts have proposed an even more drastic alteration of the space environment: the transformation of the surface of a planet or moon into a more Earth-like environment via a process known as terraforming.
The changes we would make to a cold, dry, relatively airless world like Mars would also introduce physical processes—such as wind, flowing water, and new chemical reactions—that could easily erase or contaminate any evidence that extraterrestrial life ever existed on the surface.
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