{"id":21933,"date":"2020-02-20T15:15:14","date_gmt":"2020-02-20T15:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/?p=21933"},"modified":"2020-02-20T15:15:14","modified_gmt":"2020-02-20T15:15:14","slug":"colonize-the-final-frontier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/colonize-the-final-frontier\/","title":{"rendered":"Colonize the Final Frontier?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\" style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>Researchers examine the ethical implications of space exploration<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-21956 size-featured\" src=\"http:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/02\/Screen-Shot-2020-02-17-at-2.11.00-PM-900x430.png\" alt=\"Space\" width=\"900\" height=\"430\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s2\">Space might be the final frontier, <\/span>but as China announces plans to build a moon base, NASA begins working on manned missions to Mars and spaceships continue to probe deep space, one group of scholars is asking: Are human colonies in space ethical?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">\u201cAs long as space colonization was merely the dream of science fiction fans, serious questions about how and if we should do it were moot. However, now <span class=\"s3\">that colonies have become a near-term <\/span>possibility, the question of whether and how we ought to build them <span class=\"s3\">becomes pressing,\u201d said Kelly Smith, a <\/span>philosopher and biologist at Clemson University and founding president of the Society for Social and Conceptual <span class=\"s3\">Issues in Astrobiology (SSoCIA). Smith and Keith Abney, a philosopher at Cal Poly, co-edited a special issue of the <\/span>academic journal <i>Futures <\/i>devoted to exploring these issues.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Topics like the immediate and irrevocable impact humans will make in space were missing from the discussion until recently. \u201cNow, astrobiologists are looking for fossil evidence of past life on Mars, and the possibility that Mars might host microbial life today is <span class=\"s1\">growing stronger,\u201d says Linda Billings, <\/span>a consultant to NASA\u2019s Astrobiology Program and the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. \u201cOnce humans land on Mars, the environment will be contaminated for further scientific exploration.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">In <i>Futures, <\/i><span class=\"s1\">Smith, Billings and 14 <\/span>other scholars address space colonization from their variety of disciplines: philosophy, communications, ecology, animal rights, anthropology and religion. The essays are a collective call to \u201cincorporate the ethical dimensions <span class=\"s1\">more explicitly in our decision-making,\u201d <\/span>Smith said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers examine the ethical implications of space exploration Space might be the final frontier, but as China announces plans to build a moon base, NASA begins working on manned missions to Mars and spaceships continue to probe deep space, one group of scholars is asking: Are human colonies in space ethical? \u201cAs long as space [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":21956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[193,203,202,204,201],"coauthors":[218],"class_list":["post-21933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-news","tag-2020-research-news","tag-ethics","tag-final-frontier","tag-philosophy","tag-space"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9IEky-5HL","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/02\/Screen-Shot-2020-02-17-at-2.11.00-PM.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21933"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=21933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}