Is Terraforming Planets Ethical?

In the future we may be able to claim new worlds  and forge them into paradises, but should we? The survey ship Hydra and its pilot and captain,  Brant and Jacobs, landed on HD 18445 A’s third planet almost a month ahead of schedule, and  their first month there proved very exciting indeed. It was a mineral rich world with  geology suggesting very stable solar output and geological cycles. The planet gave every sign  of being one of those planets surveyors dream of, the kind with everything colo

nists could want  in terms of an easy target for terraforming. The day was even 24 hours and 12 minutes long.  Their commission for surveying this planet was going to be huge, because even a tiny percentage  of a planet is still incomprehensible wealth. There was just one minor anomaly in an area where  there were some lakes heavy on geysers and rich in phosphorus, way up in the frozen tundra. When  they got there they realized why the rest of the planet was so dead, life if it had originated he

re  couldn’t have spread out to icy planes beyond. But as they went toward the shore of the nearest  lake to take some samples, a small many-legged centipede-like creature came out on the shore.  Brant and Jacobs stared at each other in chagrin through their helmets, then slowly, deliberately,  Jacobs crushed the alien critter under his boot. “It will have to go,” Captain Jacobs said. Looking at the steaming primordial lakes on the icy tundra and thinking about the  two centuries on ice it had t

aken them to reach this planet, their big score, Brant  nodded. It was a pity, but life is rough, and there were so many handy metal rich asteroids  in this system, another plus for colonists, and it wouldn’t be so strange for one to happen to fall  on this spot. On the off chance anything survived, the scientist would have fun trying to figure  out how the impact caused life to form there. Brant would run the calculations for an asteroid  trajectory bump when they got back into orbit. Welcome t

o another episode of Science & Futurism  with Isaac Arthur, and I am your aforementioned host, Isaac Arthur, for a little under ten years  now and just starting my second year as President of the National Space Society, so I’m guessing  there’s not a lot of suspense on this episode as to whether or not I tend to think terraforming  planets is a reasonably ethical thing to do. That said, it is not cut and dry across the board,  and so today we will examine not just why many feel terraforming is g

enerally a good idea but  also the concerns a lot of us have about it too, and some of the less well-know problems  we could have confronting us while we go around colonizing the galaxy. And we may as well start with the word ‘colonizing’, which often has some bad  connotations historically and is the main root of the concern with terraforming. It gives us our two  main cases as well as our first in-between cases for contemplation. I have encountered some folks  who genuinely think it is wrong f

or us to seek to take an entirely lifeless rock of a planet or  moon and try to turn it into a new settlement for humanity or alter its non-existent ecosystem. So  too, I have met folks who didn’t think there’d be anything wrong with showing up on some planet  that already had intelligent aliens on it and absorbing them into our civilization, or even  sometimes killing them off for fear there’d be no room for both of us in the galaxy. Neither viewpoint seems to be anything approaching common, le

t alone a majority view,  and in general I assume anyone taking either perspective online usually tends to have a  hint of someone not being serious or acting the troll. Nonetheless I’m pretty content  to bypass any serious contemplation that it’s ethically wrong for us to tamper with the  pristine surface of the Moon, or alternatively, that it is okay to just obliterate any native  civilization we encounter out among the stars. There’s more gray area once we get into  pre-existing ecologies and

this mostly because if you’ve found ten thousand planets covered  in various primitive algae and nothing else, you’ve probably got doubts about the scientific &  economic value of further study. As we discussed in our recent episode on Quarantining  Planets, the ability to keep quarantine on such a world for a couple billion years till  intelligence evolves is pretty improbable too. But practical doesn’t mean ethical and it is  our good first step, to ask when it is okay to terraform a planet w

ith pre-existing life  on it and if it matters how advanced it is, or if it should matter if we thought it likely  to have advanced life in the future or not. Twinned with that is the question of  how sure we need to be that a planet is lifeless before it is okay to terraform it. But these are the beginning questions we need to ponder because while we might be willing  to wave away whether it can be unethical to terraform a planet with no life on it,  we also have to ask ourselves if it's okay t

o do it once we’ve started settling it. Short form, if my great-grandfather founded a now robust settlement in some crater on Mars,  and folks start talking about dumping an ocean worth of water on the Red Planet, that  settlement is going to get flooded. So too, if I’ve built a beautifully floating homestead  among the clouds of Venus and folks decide to start deploying a L1 solar shade to cool  the planet and remove that thick atmosphere, like we discussed in Winter on Venus, do I have  any sa

y or is this just a matter of majority rule? And the current majority or the folks a thousand  years ago who founded the first settlements on the planet dreaming it would be another Earth,  and which fifty generations have worked toward. Maybe the planet got to half normal Earth  air pressure and composition and a lot of folks accepted genetic engineering or bionics to  let them breathe that and now no longer want the world to get any more Earth-like than it is. I am guessing if you’re watching

this episode, you already know what Terraforming is but the  key word there is Earth-like. It is the process, or processes, used to make some planet more like  Earth and has two noteworthy variants. The first is para-terraforming, which has a hazy border  with normal terraforming but tends to imply more artificial constructs that need maintenance,  like Domes covering the Martian surface to keep air and heat in, or some collection of space  stations at the L1 Lagrange Point to alter the amount a

nd type of light coming in or deflect  solar wind in place of a magnetosphere. The other option is bioforming, which is where  we alter people and organisms to fit a new planet rather than the other way around.  The extreme version would be you growing gills and becoming a merman on an ocean planet. We have tons of episodes getting into the many different methods and processes for all three,  terraforming, para-terraforming, and bioforming. But the recurring point I tend to make on the  matter i

sn’t which is better but rather that in most cases you will always end up using a bit  of all three, and moreover, the particular ratio of them and which varieties of them that you use  will likely change with time as your colony grows. What’s more, it isn’t likely that people will  have uniform opinions on that matter in different regions and periods. Planets are huge and we have  no reason to assume anything like homogeneity of people and purpose on them, anymore than Earth  has. Everybody is

going to have different goals and priorities that also shift over time. So too,  a given culture might be way more okay with one type of change than another. We could imagine  a civilization whose mythology leaned heavy on some villainous and ugly sea monster,  and those people having a very different attitude on becoming mermen and mermaids than some  culture where the Little Mermaid was a classic, and that same group of folks might get very  different attitudes about having a modification to a

thicker skin that could handle radiation  and low pressure better, or might be more okay with something soft and glossy but reject  something more akin in texture to tree bark. Terraforming is likely to be the same in  many cases because there’s always going to be some disagreement about what’s okay and  what isn’t, and also what adds unique character to their world. As an example, I think most  of us would consider two moons in the sky a very neat feature for a new planet to have and  would no

t expect anyone to suggest they need to take one of those moons apart and adjust the  other to a lunar month of 29 and half days. For all we know it might be very hard for the  terrestrial ecosystem to adapt to a 22-hour day or 26-day lunar month or a second set of tides.  Both the month and the tides are very baked into our biology and you might see an argument  over whether or not they should adjust that moon and remove the other or genetically tweak  a million species to function on a new mon

th, or new day length of 31 hours or 19. And if  one of your settlements already made that modification they are likely to be very resistant  to paying taxes to fund that massive terraforming effort to change day length or year length. Like the folks living in the deep crater being told you’d like to put an ocean there,  they are likely to feel a bit unenthusiastic about the matter. And maybe they are only 10%  of the population but maybe that’s not a “51% voted for it, and so it’s okay” type of

issue. I should also note that terraforming is very destructive. I think folks imagine some rocky  desert terrain suddenly sprouting grass and trees. However, there’s no roots preventing erosion and  mudslides and a planet you are terraforming is likely to look at least as overhauled as  if some glaciers passed through and more like if someone decided to redecorate the area  with jackhammers and h-bombs. Indeed, as we’ve discussed before, nuking a planet is one of the  realistic strategies for

expedited terraforming. If you settled the planet and decided  to initiate a big terraforming project, you might seriously consider evacuating it while  you did the bigger lifting, like making it rain non-stop for several centuries to put an ocean on  there while you dropped comets on it. What do we do about the folks who refuse to move when we tell  them their hab-dome is on a stretch of landscape likely to slide down in a muddy avalanche once  we get to terraforming? What if that crater-hab we

mentioned simply refuses? Can we make them  move? Can we make them reinforce the dome to handle being under a kilometer of water? And of course we can’t say, this may be an episode on the ethics of terraforming but  I have no special moral authority or insight as to when its okay to make someone move or  modify their hab dome for the nominal greater good of turning that planet blue and green,  anymore than I can say it is or isn’t right to find a planet with some primordial goo on  it that hasn

’t even gone multicellular yet and terraform the planet anyway. Neither really  strikes me as an easy black and white issue the way choosing to settle an entirely lifeless  rock would be or, alternatively, murdering off some indigenous alien civilization whose only  crime was to be on some rock we wanted for our own. We could discuss either for strictly academic  purposes, and feel free to in the comments, there’s lots of good sci-fi discussing unexpected  angles on that, but that’s more of an a

lien civilizations topic than a terraforming topic. For the very simple algae life case, many would say that once we’ve gotten comprehensive samples  from all over that planet, we could keep a digital archive of the genetics – we can print DNA and  probably any alien equivalent – and then just keep some preserves. As I’ve noted in some other  episodes though, you’re often safer building your nature preserves off planet in nicely isolated  space habitats, as they tend to be easier to keep invasiv

e species, poachers, and other unexpected  problems out of. But the flipside of that, and to terraforming, is not to bother turning planets  into Earth-like ones but instead to build vast artificial megastructures we can build ecologies  and civilizations inside, by default rotating cylinder habitats like the O’Neill Cylinder. These allow way more living space than planets do, kilogram for kilogram, and on an order of around  a million to one. You can deconstruct Earth to make rotating habitats

and you’d have many  quadrillions of them with a combined living area of millions of continents, and thousands  of those could be devoted to various indigenous or terrestrial nature preserves without making a  dent in that economy and vastly larger in scope than that planet you came to. More importantly,  you do not need to disassemble that planet or life-bearing Moon. You can use local asteroids  or truly dead worlds, or even suck heavy matter right out of stars, which, depending on its  metall

icity, probably has hundreds to thousands of planets worth of materials inside it. Incidentally we would not usually refer to space habitats as examples of para-terraforming  but mostly because the entire topic focuses on making existing rocks livable, conceptually they  overlap with para-terraforming or could be their own distinct category. The original use of the  word terraforming from Jack Williamson’s short story “Collision Orbit” features a modest asteroid  with a gravity generator on it t

o hold air in and let people walk around its small surface, and  that’s the first example of terraforming as again, the term was coined in that story and about that  rock. Thus that example presumably must count as terraforming rather than para-terraforming. Hence, I personally would consider cramming a rotating habitat into an asteroid as an example  of para-terraforming, but we’d loosely draw the line between it and terraforming in that it  takes regular intelligent maintenance to keep the env

ironment Earth-like. Our environment  takes maintenance too, but it is principally provided by non-intelligent actors evolved on the  planet. Everything from geological cycles to food chains is involved in this planet’s state – which  changes too – but requires no active human effort, or at least didn’t used to. I would argue  Earth is no longer a natural ecosystem in its current state and that if we disappeared  tomorrow, its eventual reversion to a natural state would be very unlike where it w

as when  humanity was less impactful. We discussed that more in our episode “Earth After Humanity”. And we need to understand that a planet left to itself might un-terraform itself. In the  case of para-terraforming, probably faster, but I could imagine us constructing diamond hard  domes that were still around and letting sunlight in for a million years and which covered all  the land and even sea, which might only be smaller lakes and ponds anyway. At some point the  natural effects of asteroi

ds crashing or volcanoes erupting ought to start breaking some domes and  letting others be covered by the dust outside them blown around by the air leaking out of the  domes and covering them over. Of course, you might engineer some organisms, or self-replicating  machines, whose job was to clean them off. This contributes to what probably is the biggest  contention on preserving native ecologies. Nature isn’t static and preserving it over millions of  years is not natural. If that’s what you’r

e doing, that might be fine, but you are effectively  intervening heavily to keep a planetary ecology static like that. So too, if you’re just trying to  leave it alone, as an experiment, you probably run out of useful new knowledge to gather at some  point, especially as it’s a continuous effort that’s expensive in time and resources,  and lost opportunity cost. Alternatively, if you’re leaving it alone because you don’t want  to interfere in nature, many folks would argue you are taking the ra

ndom processes of Darwinian  Evolution and putting them on a pedestal. Which many folks do nowadays and which they may do  in the future, but it is easy to see conflict arising between factions in a system over that. On the one hand we would figure that with so much construction material available in a solar  system, then that native world could be spared, and certainly early on while it also needs  careful study to unlock its secrets. Study could also be done in additional space habitats  you b

uilt to simulate that native world too, and doubtless you would conduct exactly those  experiments to see what the interactions were between that life and terrestrial organisms.  There’s no shortage of raw materials early on. However, I think after many thousands of years  of harvesting other raw materials and even your sun itself, people are likely to feel that the  planet could be used more effectively. I think a lot of us could see saying “Look, we’ve learned  all we can about these alien mic

roorganisms this last ten thousand years and we have more and more  infractions of people getting in there, we even had to nuke one spot to eliminate contamination,  this is a losing game, costing more every day, lets terraform that planet already”, and they  might start cutting down on quarantine funding and enforcement to make it easier for an accident  to occur and slip in some terrestrial biology. I think you’ll have these sorts of disagreements  at every level of terraforming too, transform

ing it into the main political football  of most new worlds, and systems in general, for at least many centuries if not millennia. Let’s  consider another scenario as food for thought. On the planet of Dusk the sun never rises  or sets except in a thin band of twilight. It orbits a red dwarf once a month, which it is  tidally locked to, and on which the desert side is forever baked by that enormous but dim star  overhead, while on the back it is eternal night. As usual for settlement, scientific

teams landed  first to explore and survey while the orbital infrastructure was prepared. It’s a big planet  with 20% more surface area than Earth, though only a fractionally higher surface gravity, and  possesses a weak atmosphere about 50% of Earth’s own, with nitrogen abundant, carbon dioxide  common, and traces amounts of methane and ammonia. It was a few years into study before they found  any lifeforms and this was after the survey crews had begun getting lazy about containment,  and it wa

s just bacteria anyway. Thus, they never had to consider whether to establish  themselves there. Indeed, many people think one or more of the survey crews intentionally snuck  in photosynthetic bacteria to ensure there's no way the planet wouldn’t get contaminated. It is,  after all, easy to sterilize the outside of suits and they have all sorts of leak monitors. But Dusk surprised them twice more. First it turned out there was a lot of life on the  dark side, far under the ice in many thermally

heated and volcanically fueled sub-surface  lakes, and multicellular life at that, including something akin to a small proto-fish and  proto-crab. And second, that the local organisms seemed to have a knack for genetic theft as  photosynthetic native organisms began popping up on the twilight belt. Some also suspect that other  scientists might have engineered these to ensure it would be more likely that terraforming would  proceed with more respect to the native life. The terraforming plan was

to crunch some  asteroids up to make some mirrors and lenses, and to have many statites at the L1 that would  rotate over a 24-hour period to provide a night cycle, while mirrors around the solar L2 behind  the planet would bounce light back down on the world’s dark side to give it a day cycle. We now have 4 major factions in play. The Nightbringers, who feel the planet should still  have the solar shades deployed to L1 to give the uninhabited dayside a night and some cooler  temperatures. Then

we have Daybringers, who still want that L2 shade as well, even though it will  melt the ice above all those subsurface dark side lakes. We also have the Retreat, who feel Dusk  should be abandoned entirely and that war archives should be opened to let them prepare nanotech and  bioweapons targeted to kill off any terrestrial life on the planet before self-destructing. Life  will be lived in space, by humans, and the planet left to the native ecology. Finally, we have the  Banders, who want to

limit human habitation to the Twilight band for now and aim for an eventual  synthetically mixed Terran and Dusk-ian ecology. None of them fall into a category of  wiping out the native Dusk life entirely, all 4 factions agree that samples of native  life must be vigorously sought out and have their genetics digitally stored and nature  preserves created on-planet and in orbit as more rotating habitats get built. Even at the  most optimistic estimates, organisms on Dusk are not terribly varied o

r complex by Earth  standards so it won’t take much to store it. So which camp do you think is most  right? Or maybe least wrong? And who if anyone are the villains of the piece,  the Daybringers, Nightbringers, the Retreat, or the Banders? Are they missing something? So, what are our major conundrums for contemplation? Well, probably more than we  could list off but here are the major ones I hear come up, and of course your mileage may  vary, and some were addressed during the episode, though y

ou be the judge of if it  was addressed satisfactorily or not. Environmental Impact and Responsibility: The  process of terraforming could have irreversible impacts on the existing environment of  a planet, again even mild terraforming is likely to rearrange the landscape, not  simply spray paint it blue and green. It will also have phases of growing complexity  that will move it more Earth-like and might entail intentional mass extinctions as  we advance that complexity. This raises questions a

bout our responsibility  towards extraterrestrial ecosystems, even if they are initially barren  or uninhabitable by Earth standards. Interference with Potential Life Forms:  There's a possibility, however remote, of existing or dormant life forms on other  planets. Planets are huge and we have no idea what nooks and crevices they might be able to  hide life in, certainly Earth has offered us many surprising examples already. Terraforming could  disrupt or destroy these life forms. The ethical i

mplications of potentially harming alien life  through accident or negligence are significant. Resource Exploitation and Sustainability:  Terraforming would likely require massive amounts of resources, especially for cases  such as comet bombardment to create oceans. This raises concerns about sustainability and the  ethics of depleting a star system’s resources for such a project, particularly in contrast  to artificial space habitats like O’Neill Cylinders or even post-biological  civilization

s running on starlight. Human Safety and Health: The health and safety of  humans involved in terraforming projects are also ethical concerns. This includes both the pioneers  who initiated the process and potential future inhabitants. Terraforming might be physically  dangerous, but it could also be ruinously stressful as it’s a project of centuries at a  minimum. We may be in awe of the efforts needed to build mighty structures like the pyramids or  the cathedrals which often took many lifetim

es, but we should not ignore the human cost those  construction projects likely had on many folks who paid for them and had them looming over their  lives, sometimes literally. Terraforming might be orders of magnitude more intense and protracted. Cultural and Philosophical Perspectives: Different cultures and philosophical perspectives  may view the idea of terraforming in varying ways, like our example with mermen and mermaids  from earlier. No matter what happens, you are building a new cultu

re on a planet,  indeed likely several, who will be shaped by that terraforming effort and who will likely  have their main political and diplomatic tension points be about it too. Ruinous wars might be  fought over how to bring life to a world, and a side opposed to further terraforming might be  willing to unleash terrifying weapons that would re-sterilize a planet. In the grander realm, back  here on Earth where the vast colonial ark ships will be built and launched from, some may see it  as

a human overreach or interference with nature on a cosmic scale, while others may view it as a  necessary step for human survival and expansion. And in the long term, these are projects  that require people to stick to the plan for many generations and it is very hard to  see how you would maintain a clear consensus. Even in a society that’s cracked radical life  extension, and thus might have its founding members still alive to see terraforming complete  a hundred centuries later, will still ha

ve tons of new people being born and other people  changing their minds. Who has authority on that planet to make these decisions and make them  continue if public opinion shifts occasionally? In the end, terraforming involves complex ethical  considerations across every aspect of human life, not to mention altering human life through  bioforming, but spreads beyond that to every other organism we’ve encountered, terrestrial or alien. For my part, I’m strongly in favor of terraforming but not re

cklessly. I don’t expect to find  much intelligent life out there in the galaxy and I don’t expect simple single-celled  life to be particularly common either, so I suspect finding a planet with it will be such  a wonderful novelty and scientific gold mine that people won’t be anxious to change that planet. Nor  are colonists arriving in a new system out of luck if a planet turns out to have some simple life on  it that probes missed. I favor space habitats for human expansion and regard the ter

raforming of an  entire planet as a quest of thousands of years and a commitment to maintenance of it for millions of  years to come. There’s no need to rush into it. But ultimately, I feel humanity should  embrace grand and noble purposes, and it’s hard to think of many grander and nobler  purposes than bringing life to a once dead world. Our conversation today was on ethics involving  the advancement and usage of technology, and if you ever need any proof of how important  that is to discuss i

n advance, the internet and artificial intelligence both stand as recent and  glaring examples of how important that can be. We are bombarded constantly by people trying  to steal and sell our data and now Artificial Intelligence is involved in the game, harvesting  your information and putting it out there for others to exploit. Just between 2021 and 2022 the  number of victims of identity theft rose 41.5%. The good news is that you have the right to  protect your privacy and request that data

brokers delete the information they hold  about you. The bad news is that it would take you years to do it manually, just once.  And you’d need to repeat the process every few months as data brokers continue collecting  your data and creating new records, using AI. But two can play that game, and that’s where  our sponsor, Incogni, comes in. They deploy AI to focus on finding your information online  and send automated takedown requests for you. All you have to do is sign up, give them  permissi

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n to get an  exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Go to https://incogni.com/isaacarthur  and take your data back. So we were talking about terraforming today and  many feel that the first planet we’ll try that on is Mars, and next week we’ll travel to Mars, not  to look at the Red Planet, but instead at its two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, and ask why and  how we could settle them. Then it will be time for our sci-fi sunday episode, Automated Justice,  for a 50-minute deep dive on the rol

e of AI in our courts and justice system. Then we’ll return to  the Fermi paradox on March 21st to discuss that evolutionary jump from the simple to complex, and  if that might be the solution to the big question of where all the alien life is. Then we’ll  finish our discussion of last month on black holes by deep diving kugelblitz black holes  and using them for power generation, before finishing out the month, with a bonus scifi sunday  episode on the 31st, Multi-Planetary empires. If you’d li

ke to get alerts when those and other  episodes come out, make sure to hit the like, subscribe, and notification buttons. You  can also help support the show on Patreon, and if you’d like to donate or help in other ways,  you can see those options by visiting our website, IsaacArthur.net. You can also catch all of SFIA’s  episodes early and ad free on our streaming service, Nebula, along with hours of bonus content  like Crystal Aliens, at go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur. As always, thanks for watching

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