A lot of baut members know me here and I'm not one for conspiracies. But I think its only a matter of time, our generation's time, before we find the answer to alien life existing within our own solar system. NASA landed Rovers on Mars that found evidence of very ancient water beds, Europe is looking at life in the Jovian system and Laplace a joint ESA/NASA/JAXA mission might be under development. Chinese might go to Mars with the Russians in the near future. Space has brought us great developments, better communication, new breakthrough in the sciences, satellite mapping of forest fires, forecast of hurricanes etc. but our LV technology can also launch things like nuclear weapons or ASAT weapons.

If alien life is found, maybe its only something as simple like a bacteria, even more simple than a plant or an amoebas
but might be only a matter of time before some hawks or militant people want to turn the discovery into a bio-weapon. We also must consider how not to contaminate/eradicate alien life because of our efforts to study them.


<I'm not sure where to post this so if Moderators see something wrong with this thread please move/edit it etc>

I'm not sure that there would be any more threat of exo-bacteria being weaponized than Earth-bound bacteria. The vast majority of bacteria here are harmless - why would bacteria elsewhere necessarily be any different?

Your second point, though, is very important. What obligations do we have to any life we find out there? Is it valuable because it's from space? Does it make life less valuable because it is so common? Is it okay to terraform Mars if we find native life there?

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies
http://www.state.gov/t/ac/trt/5181.htm

some interesting articles on the military applications of space
http://www.russianspaceweb.com/almaz_ops2.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/...china/asat.htm
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php...72&c=AME&s=AIR
http://www.dbtechno.com/space/2008/0...sion-in-space/

back to the life in space topic
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article346.htm

Our darker examples of humanity will be far more likely to concentrate on life that's already adapted to infecting human beings and/or surviving in our type of environment, before trying to weaponize alien life that would in all probablility be poisoned by free oxygen.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

"Militant?"

We do have a very slight amount of evidence from a Martian meteorit fragment that evidences life. We have a very slightly bit more evidence that it was a rebound effect from something striking the earth, chucking it up to Mars where it was chucked back to us many years later.

The drainage patterns on Mars are unmistakable. Anyone who has spent any time flying over the American southwest (or any other former well-known drainage areas) would recognize the telltale signs instantly. Non-water desert conditions (and, yeah, I've flown over those, too) produce a totally difference visual signature.

At one time, Mars HAD water on it.

How long ago?

I don't know. I'm not a geologist. I've just flown over 78% (this is a conservative estimate) of our planet, and despite not being a geologist, I've studied a couple of sciences here and there...

Ok. Here's the botton line:

Perhaps a billion years ago, life proliferated on Mars.

So what?

Right now, it proliferates on Earth.

We know from meteorites that supposed (and as yet only partially unconfirmed) potential examples of like have been kicked back and forth over the years through meteor impacts. My son might have one hasn't been fully analyzed, yet) in his treasure chest, on his desktop, one I found in some desert. That it's an extraterrestrial meteorite is undisputed. That it came from another planet remains to be determined, yet all the tell-tales to date indicate it wasn't a simple extrasolar chunk of rock.

Whoopee.

If the initial stages of our planetary formation holds any merit, there are probably billions (ok, millions) of such examples. I witnessed three such at the museum located at the Arkansa airport Air and Space museum within the last six months.

Back to basics... It's extremely highly unlikely that alien (to our solar system) exists anywhere within our solar system. Given what I know of interplanetary geoimpacts, however, I do find it very likely that meteoric impacts have, probably many times, introduced life from one planet to another over the millenia.

So which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I'd throw my lot into the planet with the greatest liklihood of supporting life (as we know it) in the first place.

Earth.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.