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Comment by Tabular-Iceberg | Hacker News Reader

It makes me concerned thinking about what kind of biological contamination this rover might have brought to Mars that may seriously hamper the search for signs of past native life.

JPL is very forthcoming about their cleanliness procedures, China not so much. And they don’t exactly have a great track record in this respect.

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I may have an unorthodox opinion about this, but I believe our primary goal should be to propagate life rather than to search for it. Sooner or later, we will need to expand our horizons as a species. When that time comes, we will benefit greatly from a long period of study regarding the forms of earthly life that can potentially survive elsewhere. To me, finding evidence of past life would be fascinating and groundbreaking, but not particularly actionable.

It would be an interesting experiment for sure to see if one could "terraform" Mars with some kind of life from Earth. But I don't see how it would be any more actionable than any discovery of past life. Both experiments will give greater insight into theories like abiogenesis and panspermia, but that's about it. Better to exhaust the first before trying the second, since you can't undo the second one. Also a bit more scientific rigour than just seeing what happens to piggyback on the spacecraft would probably be warranted.

That's what the spanish did with the native americans

About 90% died as a result. If the objective was to propagate life, they definitely failed

The Spanish knew Native Americans (humans) existed in the New World, and actively persecuted and enslaved them.

This is a poor comparison.

Have we found and enslaved humans on Mars?

China doesn't have any worse (or better) reputation than JPL in cleaning their crafts. This is pure speculation. If anything the US RU space race were much more likely to have spread bugs than modern crafts.

Interesting point. Do you have any examples of previous problems regarding cleanliness?

Odd.

Sending a rover to another planet is an engineering feat. Your worry is the Chinese space agency and its staff dont know how to decontaminate?

That is properly odd of not myopic.

It's a cultural and institutional problem. All you have to do is extrapolate from their general hygienic practices. Wet markets, gutter oil, the whole Covid-19 pandemic. Germ theory isn't even fully accepted in China, I'm sure someone would have suggested rubbing down the spacecraft with ginseng to align the chi or something. Couple that with the demonstrably awful spacemanship in dropping rocket stages completely at random, for no other reason than méi bàn fǎ.

Of course there's a lot of Chinese people, especially of the younger generations, who are perfectly smart and conscientious about these things, just like the whistleblowers at the start of the pandemic. But who do you think approves the budgets for things like decontamination and controlled re-entry procedures, but the feckless, corrupt and superstitious CCP uncles who were formed by Mao's cultural revolution?

Of course any criticism of communist China is going to be met with a long string of whataboutisms, so I might as well pre-empt it. Yes, shame on the Americans for incinerating 17 of their astronauts out and endangering many others with their negligence. Shame on the Russians for everything they did wrong. I don't have a horse in the space race, they are all worthy of criticism. Criticism of one does not imply that any of the other are perfect, anyone who thinks that is clearly an idiot.

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