Bringing Back Samples to Earth One thing which cannot be denied is we sometimes make mistakes. I am not talking about little mistakes; I am talking about very big mistakes. Take for example our supposedly secure laboratories which are used to work with some very contagious diseases. How many times have diseases gotten out of the places and yet they are supposed to be totally safe? We can’t even answer this question because many of the leaks have been secret. Plum Island is a little island off the coast of Long Island New York. For years it has been said secret experiments were going on there and indeed we have found some very strange carcasses on Long Island which seem to have come from there. Even if we don’t know about the leaks from secret labs, there are enough leaks we do know about to make us very nervous. Why am I bringing this up? Well, this is not the first time I have mentioned this but the reason I’m bringing it up again is we are getting nearer to the time when NASA claims it is going to return samples from Mars. Should the samples be brought back to the planet Earth or should they be sent to a secure area at the space station or another space station? The problem with samples are we don’t know how they might react when we move them from where they are. They could test perfectly safe on Mars but something in the atmosphere could cause them to be dangerous. Before these things are brought to earth they should at least be put into quarantine and probably for a year or more. In that quarantine every test should be run to make sure it is safe to return them here. Space travel is not 100% safe and for that matter nothing is. Say for example we are told by scientists not to worry because the proper care will be taken of these samples as soon as they are sent back to earth. As they are being returned, we find out something went wrong with the ship and it crashed into the planet. Now the samples will be exposed to our atmosphere. I know this sounds like the basis of a science fiction movie but one cannot be too careful with samples from alien worlds. I have no way of knowing how many others feel this way but I am sure they have to be some scientists that are worried about returning samples directly to earth. I have not heard any talk about how the preparations would be made for the return of the samples and I am not alone in this instance. Others have said they believe there isn’t enough time to prepare for the return of the samples which are scheduled to be brought back to earth in 2032. We have problems right here on our own world. As we cut down more trees in the rainforest there is a chance we could be releasing deadly viruses and such which are in the ground. This isn’t the only place we have to worry about, as the ice melts in different regions of the world nobody really knows what might be living in it when it comes to microbes. Human beings are very sensitive to diseases and for all we know there could have been life on Mars that was wiped out by a terrible disease which could be hibernating in just waiting to be brought to a place that has life. I certainly don’t like to scare people but I do think it doesn’t make sense even for scientists to take chances with people’s lives. So far, we have gotten lucky. I remember when the atom smasher known as the Large Hadron Collider was updated to make it more powerful, and scientists told us we would now be able to create mini black holes with it. I didn’t think that was too smart either but the scientists told us they would only last for a millisecond, and it turned out so far they have been right, but they took a chance and when they did that chance was taken on our lives. Creating a mini black hole could still be a problem, it only takes one to start growing and we are all finished. I am not a big fan of some of the guarantees scientists make when they are performing experiments and such which could kill people. There are scientists admitting they have biological concerns and issues with the idea of returning off world samples back to earth. I don’t think they give this as much thought as they should and the reason I say this is the concerns they have listed have more to do with their work. Many scientists claim they worry about what type of investigations will be done with the samples, will there be contamination of the samples from handling them and what types of samples should be returned. I think they should be more worried about contaminating us. One thing we have to realize is once we start bringing samples back to the earth from Mars, this will open the door to bringing samples back from other planets, moons, asteroids and other heavenly bodies. Just because we have safeguards in place doesn’t mean they will always work when we are handling material from other worlds. Look what happened with the sterilization program we had for sending spacecraft to Mars. We found out it could never be 100% perfect and we also screwed up at least one time if not more. The one time I know about was with one of the Rovers, we forgot to sterilize the drill bit. We have already contaminated Mars and I would hate to see things go the other way around and Mars contaminates us. We have no idea what type of microscopic life there may be off world. It might turn out to be the same as the life we have on the earth, but on the other hand it might not. Even if it is the same as what we have on earth the environment from where it came from my have made it a lot stronger and a lot more resistant so that even if a type of microbe which would be harmless on earth came from Mars, it might be dangerous to us. We just don’t have enough knowledge yet about what is out there. Of course, the next question is, if we were to know every type of microbe in our solar system that still doesn’t mean the same ones exist in a different solar system or even a different galaxy? No one really knows the answer to that question. We just have to be extremely careful in the way we bring things back.
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