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Comment by gwill | Hacker News Reader

sending a human there also contaminates the planet more, allowing us to learn less.

I will never understand that point of view. Mars is a lifeless rock.

As far as we know. As of right now, we are reasonably confident that we haven't contaminated it. So if anything resembling biological byproducts turn up we can say with reasonable confidence that we have discovered evidence of historical life on mars. As soon as a human sets foot there that's no longer the case.

That said, personally I'm in favor of manned missions to as many bodies in the solar system as possible.

> As far as we know.

You could argue that forever. When is it time to accept that there isn't any there, and if there is, it is insignificant?

No idea, but presumably that would be after we've explored a fair bit of it. We've barely scratched the surface.

It seems quite plausible that there could be ground water. If that's the case (and I suppose even if it's not) it wouldn't be at all surprising for the cave systems to contain microbial life.

There's always going to be one more place to search.

We should be spreading Terran life everywhere in the solar system, not pretending we are some sort of contagion.

That isn't even remotely what I said though. Indeed I'm in favor of that in the end. But you're trying to invoke "just one more" when realistically we haven't even started for real yet. So it seems more like you just want to entirely skip the sterile part of exploration where we're careful not to cross contaminate. Which is certainly a valid position (though I disagree with it) but I think you should be up front about that.

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