Peterkin

I don't use it anymore, except in the rare instance when I cancel a spiteful down-vote to a reasonable post. Have no real problem with graffiti - it's less intrusive than lavish use of emoticons.

No. They should come from a veil of ignorance. I doubt it, but don't rule it out - I'm sure I would try diplomatic tactics first. It would be an emotional decision, not an ethical one. If I stepped back one pace and asked "How sure are we that this is one of the perpetrators and knows the answer?" 99%? 85%? 60%? What's the cutoff line of probability that makes torture okay or not okay? If I took two steps back and asked: "Who is making the determination of guilt? On what grounds? What's their record of accuracy?" I might begin to doubt more. If I stepped back a little farther and asked, "What if that suspected child-abductor were my son?" I may be convinced of his innocence; the police may be convinced of his guilt; neither I nor nor the police know what lies or truths he might divulge under torture (People notoriously say whatever the torturer wants them to.) and neither of us knows, if they eventually discover his innocence, what lasting effect this experience will have on him (and meanwhile, the child has been killed - no gains, net loss). I might then regret having authorized such methods from the safety of a voting booth. Nobody ever does. Legal codes have to define it, but no definition is ever objective. A system of cultural perceptions and assumptions underlie one's idea of what constitutes torture, just as in what constitutes 'cruel and unusual punishment' or coercion, or extortion, harassment, etc. Just as there is a cultural bias in deciding the limits of enforcement authority. As you say; he ought to try it. Hematology technicians and nurses have to practice injections on one another. Maybe legislators and police should be required to practice the methods of interrogation they put into law. No. The means determine the ends. Ends are imaginary. The outcome you envisage is far from certain. You expect one path to lead to a particular desired destination, and you may be wrong and get lost. Where you actually end up may be quite a different place - and it may have changed by the time you arrive because of your decisions along the way. If you resort to unethical practice, acknowledge it as an emotional decision, rather than painting an ethical face on it. Everyone does, but no two people agree completely on all aspects of any single issue, let alone all issues. The best we can hope for as a society is general consensus on the tenets (hence national and professional constitutions) legislation to draw the broad outlines, and protracted legal wrangling over the details.

Amazing, indeed! But it became a mass market item. Surgery that benefits 0.6% of the people will never be cheap. Whichever technique also benefits accident victims and soldiers injured in combat becomes that much more accessible. Nevertheless, medicine is, to a large extent, monopolistic - somewhat immune to market pressures. I wouldn't put it quite that way. I don't approve of religious conviction driving legislation, but I have to acknowledge its presence - which is likely not only to continue for some time yet, but even to inflict some, or much backlash damage on socially progressive lawmaking and enforcement. Note the steamrolling of reproductive freedoms in the US and elsewhere. As well, there is a retrogressive element that has gained alarming momentum under the Trump regime and I predict a continued rise in violence against minority populations of every kind: the Peterson brigades are loose on all the world. Legislative assemblies quake before them and will certainly cave to some of their demands. Again, that's a topic only tangentially related to this one. No argument from me! Only, medical science is not in a very strong position right now. So much the research talent, facilities, materials and budget have been consumed by Covid. Health-care workers are stressed-out, exhausted, beleaguered and fed up. Many have died, many more have quit. Life-saving, limb-saving surgeries have been delayed or shelved; clearing up the back-log is going to take a long time -- a long time, that is, from whenever it can even start. Plague, pestilence and war make any future progress precarious.

I didn't ask 'Why?'. I asked 'What for?' - as in what's aim, the purpose, the payoff? A future probable home for whom or what? Are you proposing to send extrastellar space-pods full of humans, 5+ light-years away, to a planet that will, by then, maybe have amoeba? Do other planets need or want a Cambrian explosion? So did Sagan. From him, you didn't mind, though you misinterpreted both. There you go with that "known" again. "Is not known" implies that nobody, anywhere knows it. But since you don't know about anybody, anywhere else, all it really means is "I don't know." Humans are the only space-faring species that humans know about. (Not that that has any bearing on my depriving them of chances.) Those would not be rational reasons for crossing the road or climbing on the roof or fetching a glass from the kitchen. They are certainly not rational reasons for undertaking a giant project of which you will never see the result, from which you will never learn anything and which will benefit nobody. That isn't reasoning; that is chest-thumping.

Probably. What for? Not very nice. Volcanic gases: methane, ammonia; rocks cooling down to where water could stay liquid. Inhospitable for complex life forms, but just right for cyanobacteria and anoxygenic algae. Presumably, they were preceded by chemical processes under close scrutiny but not yet clear. Because: -according to the data doesn't cover any information beyond what you are capable of collecting - which decreases as the distance of the targeted planet from Earth increases (also, you might miss the planet you're aiming for and hit something about which you have zero data) - has no obvious idigenous life - The earliest beginnings of life are unlikely to have been obvious here, either. (But it would be ironical in the extreme if that 'special' life we so prize had actually been planted here by scientists from another planet and it consumed all the brand new native life that was not obvious to their long-range data collecting equipment.) - and conditions such that any probablity of abiogenesis is low - this would mean, so is the probability of the planted seed surviving. Talk about killing a few million bacteria the hard way! - help that process along - help what process? You just said abiogenesis wasn't happening, or even likely to happen! How is that relevant? I thought the proposal was to send out microbes in a test-tube, not human specimens in a lifeboat. I never picked it up. Nor do I accept it from you now. I have never taken away a chance at anything from any space-faring civilization. I just don't think it's a good idea to send germs to outer space. The moon, maybe; Titan, maybe. Contaminating other solar systems for an egotistical display, carried out at great (not readily calculable) cost with no expected benefit is potentially irresponsible and bad universal citizenship.

I didn't forget. Ask your questions in the appropriate forum in the appropriate language, and I will be happy to answer them.

You respect him so immensely that you twist his words to suit your agenda.

He was right. He did put in "so far", but left out "by us". Apparently, he was wrong about that. The posturing self-importance bolstered by ignorance not only goes unchallenged, but now the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe reaches out to colonize other planets, while continuing to trash this one - because we're pretty sure nobody lives there and don't care who would like to go on living here.

'We' are not a planet. We are one of millions of the species living on a planet. We don't know (yet) of any other planets that support life. From this lack of knowledge, we infer that this planet is special among planets, and since we happen to live on it through no merit of our own, assume that we are the species a very few privileged individuals of whose large membership, is rightfully empowered to be representatives and decision-makers for the entire planet, unilaterally spreading our special brand of specialness throughout the universe.

Do you never worry that Atlas might shrug?

Sounds good. But what's being attracted is the same very small portion of geeky kids who were always attracted. It won' touch the God-fearin, gun-totin, Trumpster portion of America, and it won't sway any Republican representatives to vote any money for a space program, unless it's heavily weaponized.

Boy, is that thread title correct!

I had a feeling you might.

I know. I answered that, as well as pointing out the difference between maintaining a balance between a host and its population of known, well established bacterial culture and potentially eradicating an, independent, unknown life-form that's just getting started on a distant planet; the difference between defending my life against invasion and invading those who pose no threat to me. If that's too dramatic and pacifist for logic, SBI.

Oh, I dunno. According to my philosophy, it wouldn't have been so so bad for Europeans to 'stagnate' (read: clean up their own shit) in Europe, when they had the capability to invade and subdue other continents. I think there is some scope for us to make progress on Earth before we take this show on the interstellar road.

No, evolution is a process; our place is a planet we call Earth. No, extraterrestrial life-forms are not the same as terrestrial bacteria. (Ask any of the scientists who devote their professional energies to searching for a sign - any sign! - of life - any life! - elsewhere in the universe.) My oral flora and I do share a place and must make whatever accommodation we can for survival. Humans also share a a place with all the other species on our planet. Many humans believe that, because they are able to kill, abuse, exploit and displace other species, it is their natural right and the proper thing to do. Many humans also believe that, if they are more powerful than some other humans, it means they're more evolved and so it becomes their god-given right to kill, abuse, exploit and displace those other people. I'm not forced to kill many other species in self-defence, but I would if they attacked me first, just as I would kill another of my own species. But I don't go one centimeter out of my way to harm something that's no threat to me. I see no reason to go 5 light-years out of my way to do it. That's what you call it. And in this layman's opinion, you're wrong.

What else would it be doing, and where else would it be? Whether it has ideas has no effect on my perception of its place in the universe in relation to my place in the universe. Suggesting that it's a good idea to refrain harming something that's done us no harm really isn't tantamount to excusing Hitler. It's not even in the same ballpark. Or continent. Nor is speculative psychoanalysis of other posters.

Is this relevant to a concern for an unknown life-form, minding its own business on its own planet?

I did that in California; you could get some pretty good and plonk at the supermarket. (awful beer, though) It's okay for some Canadian wines - mostly white, so there is a refrigerator space issue. But we don't have a big choice of boxed French at my LCBO outlet.

Yes! And let dry completely. The ever-nagging, unpleasant chore of manual washing and sterilizing of bottles was one main reason I stopped making wine. How often I longed for my big, energy-hog of a laboratory glass-washer!

We have no trouble with bubbly wine - because we don't like it anyway. A modestly priced red quite happily withstands occasional visits over a week or longer, just so we screw the top back on. A slightly higher priced one comes with a cork, which can be replaced with a tight-fitting nylon one (I learned about those temporary corks when I was making my own wine.) I've only ever had one red wine go sour (during a course of antibiotic treatment) and it still made a lovely tofu au vin. Screw-cap whites do well in the fridge or cold pantry for at least a week. The home-made was all in small bottles, and usually shared out immediately on uncorking. Lesson, I suppose: don't buy the good stuff in bulk. But, come to think of it, my uncles in the old country used to keep a geroboam of Bull's Blood or something red, for whenever male company might turn up, and sweet white or liquor in small bottles for the ladies. In the cold pantry, on the stone floor. I know, because it was rite of passage for a child to be big enough to bring it in.

If you have a very tight cork and you bung it in right away. Not if you leave it sitting in a glass. I put the screw-cap tightly back on the bottle when I pour ginger ale, and it lasts, with a little less energy each time, for three or four more pourings. Containment makes a difference. I'll toast you with whatever British beer I can get quickly. Never could stand the poser!

'preciate it

Do they? huh! Yes, that's the one. The Earth Imperial Doctrine. I would prefer the people who direct and fund scientific endeavour to stop short of self-immolation. But I think that's a forlorn hope, given the hard-wired pragmatism of one's species. No, but that discussion is so far off-topic as to belong on a whole different board. It should have offered, but failing that, the universe should at least reveal. In any case, the onus is on the universe to show why we shouldn't, not on us to show why we should. Check. There was a context: to which I respond: "we" are not leaving the planet we overpopulated; only a handful of microbes get away. Lucky microbes! https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/iss-space-junk-sensor-4324/ P: the doctrine which includes the tenet "Life as we know it must not end." All of you, in one way or another: the world will end; use-by date; must make sure it continues after we're gone, eggs in one basket - all that tedious we're-too-precious-for-the-universe-to-get-by-without dramaticals. I didn't make them up - I don't give a stuff is life ends here.

Does that oblige/entitle an individual of a more complex evolutionary form, to boost the inherent proliferative capabilies of microbes beyond the solar system of their origin? Only, Mautner and Matloff, et al, are not defending their own lives or promoting their own survival, nor yet that of their offspring. We are to form a collective with the life-forms we have been extirpating with great deliberation, ingenuity and industry on the planet of their origin, so that they may carry "our collective" to other planets. While some humans are incapable of keeping their amino acids inside their atmosphere, other member of the same-wired species are capable of practicing homo-, geno-, specie- and suicide, as well as conscious self- and birth-control. Having trashed one planet is That's not what the discussion was about. It was about seeding, not fleeing.