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Environmental ethics and planetary engineering

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Abstract

The question of engineering lifeless planets so that they can support a terrestrial biota raises new and interesting questions in environmental ethics that involves extending our perspective from here on Earth. Whilst progress in natural science will ultimately decide whether terraforming can be done, it is to ethics that we must turn to ask whether it should be done. In this paper, three geocentric ethical theories, homocentrism, zoocentrism and biocentrism, are used to address the question of ecopoiesing or terraforming Mars. We conclude that none of them rule out such a venture as necessarily immoral. However, one can conceive of a cosmocentric ethic that extends the moral universe outwards from the Earth in which certain cosmic objects are accorded intrinsic worth due to their uniqueness. The permissibility of terraforming within an ethical framework such as this is less clear.

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... Kwestia ta implikuje etyczną dopuszczalność terraformowania innych ciał niebieskich. Etyka kosmocentryczna wskazuje, że przekształcanie innych planet wymaga pogodzenia utrzymania warunków koniecznych dla przeżycia człowieka z koniecznością zachowania istniejących ekosystemów (MacNiven 1995). W dyskusji tej Martyn J. Fogg twierdzi, że transformacja Marsa i przekształcenie całej planety w sposób gwarantujący stworzenie warunków do życia dla ludzi jest etycznie dopuszczalne. ...
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W świetle prognozowanych zagrożeń związanych z możliwością utrzymania życia na Ziemi takich jak zanieczyszczenie środowiska, globalne ocieplenie, wzrost liczby ludności, wyczerpywanie się zasobów czy związane z tymi zagrożeniami potencjalne konflikty zbrojne na duża skalę można przypuścić, że za kilkadziesiąt lat Ziemia przestanie być odpowiednim środowiskiem życia dla ludzi. W tym świetle nowego znaczenia nabierają plany kolonizacji innych obiektów Układu Słonecznego, przede wszystkim Marsa. Projekt taki przewiduje nie tylko prywatna inicjatywa MarsOne, ale przede wszystkim NASA, która przewiduje stworzenie kolonii na Marsie w latach 30 XXI wieku. Wydaje się jednak, że skoncentrowanie się na kwestiach technicznych związanych z możliwością zorganizowania transportu i utrzymaniem życia astronautów na Marsie przysłania znacznie istotniejsze problemy polityczne, prawne i społeczne, które będą związane z tą misją. W artykule wskazujemy na wybrane możliwe wyzwania i zagrożenia dotyczące kwestii politycznych i społecznych oraz prawnych, z którymi zapewne wiązać się będzie stworzenie stałej ludzkiej kolonii na Marsie. Przypuszczamy, że przyszła kolonizacja Marsa naznaczona będzie ryzykiem konfliktów wewnątrz- i międzygrupowych, jak i możliwą rywalizacją między różnymi agencjami kosmicznymi, która może przybrać postać nowego wyścigu kosmicznego.
... Few prescriptions however are articulated with Turner's poetic con"dence. MacNiven refrained from any prescription at all from his study of the ethics of terraforming Mars and was content to #esh out the rival theories that might be applied [22]. Four such rival theories, which are broadly representative of the spectrum of ethical thought, are summarised in Table 1. ...
Article
While proposals for settling in the space frontier have appeared in the technical literature for over 20 years, it is in the case of Mars that the ethical dimensions of space settlement have been most studied. Mars raises the questions of the rights and wrongs of the enterprise more forcefully because: (a) Mars may possess a primitive biota; and (b) it may be possible to terraform Mars and transform the entire planet into a living world. The moral questions implicit in space settlement are examined below from the standpoints of four theories of environmental ethics: anthropocentrism, zoocentrism, ecocentrism and preservationism. In the absence of extraterrestrial life, only preservationism concludes that space settlement would be immoral if it was seen to be to the benefit of terrestrial life. Even if Mars is not sterile, protection for Martian life can be argued for either on intrinsic or instrumental grounds from the standpoints of all of these theories. It is argued further that a strict preservationist ethic is untenable as it assumes that human consciousness, creativity, culture and technology stand outside nature, rather than having been a product of natural selection. If Homo sapiens is the first spacefaring species to have evolved on Earth, space settlement would not involve acting `outside nature', but legitimately `within our nature'.
... MacNiven, while offering no additional reasons, agrees with Haynes and McKay, and further suggests that homocentrism, zoocentrism, and biocentrism would present no moral objection to activities such as terraforming. 25 Nevertheless, some traditional ethical ideas have been applied to the question at hand. ...
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