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We will be placing a manned base on the moon within the decade, if plans work out correctly. We already have a manned space station. We are making plans for a manned mission to Mars as well.

The definition of ecology precludes any consideration for environments devoid of biological organisms. Earth is the only known place humans can physically access that has any biology, and therefore, any ecology.

Can any act done off earth that impacts some extra-terrestrial climate be considered “unethical?”

For example, abandoning a nuclear reactor core, or venting massive amounts of toxic gasses, or removing an entire mountain by mineral mining.

Vogon Poet
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    The idea of toxic gasses is meaningless on an uninhabited planet such as Jupiter, which is literally (more or less) made of toxic gasses, to us anyway. – Frog Apr 16 '22 at 04:42
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    Arguably, the responsible use of other planets resources is a part of ethics. For example, one might think dropping the nuclear waste from their spaceship's reactor on Mars is convenient, yet it would make the place uncolonizable for a while. – armand Aug 15 '22 at 18:47
  • As Frog said… it’s already uninhabitable. – Vogon Poet Aug 15 '22 at 21:14
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    [The ethics of space is already an issue](https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000120681), although closer to earth than the Moon or Mars - due to large amount of garbage and discarded satellites orbiting the Earth; – Roger Vadim Sep 13 '22 at 08:46
  • As worded, the bold part of your question ("*Can any act done off earth that impacts some extra-terrestrial climate be considered “unethical?*”) would include extraterrestrial locations that had life. You could improve the wording of this question. – philosodad Sep 15 '22 at 14:26
  • "*Did you hear about the restaurant on the Moon? The food is* great, *but there's* **no atmosphere!**" – Scott Rowe Sep 30 '22 at 15:53

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The existence of ethics for other planets does not automatically mean it's immoral to waste or destroy other planets. It only means we need to think about consequences and maxims. But else it can be ethical to dump all our nuclear waste on the moon if we can get it there safely, and nobody on the moon is harmed.

tkruse
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It's an interesting question.

Mars may have had life. There are serious ideas it could have evolved there, and reached Earth with the collision that created the Moon when it seems Mars was stripped of water. See The Giant Impact Hypothesis. This could help explain how life began no less than 0.1 billion years after the Earth formed a solid crust, which seems very quick. It could help elucidate life on Earth as resulting from particularly hard steps, helping solve the Fermi Paradox. This would be grouped under the Rare Earth hypothesis. Now, the evidence for this might be very difficult to find. Introducing bacteria to Mars, and terra forming it, could very reasonably obscure it forever. Is there then a moral concern, to changing Mars?

No. Because there aren't moral subjects there currently. It is a question of scientific priority. But that has to be contrasted with other competing concerns, like getting humans established on Mars who can do research. Similarly, Enceladus, the water-moon of Saturn, could have already produced a separate incidence of abiogenesis, or it could do in the future given time. That is very scientifically interesting. But until we find moral subjects there, it is not a moral concern.

We can make an argument about the moral concern of future humans. Polluting the Moon, could limit it's used as a base to move out into the Solar System. Creating a liveable environment on Mars could help ensure human and Earth-biosphere survival in the case of nuclear war, or a powerful comet impact, or other events.

You have to look at the drivers of climate ethics. Moral subjects. Social contract with the unborn. The Golden Rule. Power and wealth inequalities in impacts and policy making. Irreversability of most extinctions, and the role of biodiversity in creating a stable healthy biosphere. The capacity for species to attain sentience in the future or already to have it, like dolphins and orangutans, that are being affected.

Earth will be fine, the biosphere will evolve and adapt. There is almost no imaginable event that could wipe out life on Earth, certainly not a human-caused one. Humanity, could possibly get wiped out, and certainly could have their long-term interests devasted. We find it difficult to see how profound the impacts happening in our own lives are, to see the consequences of just the changes of behaviour that have happened in our own generation. 30% of species on Earth went extinct in the last 50 years, and insects have declined by 75%, the 2020 Global Living Planet Index shows an average 68% fall in populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016. Change has never been this fast, even the comet impact at Chicxulub that generated the C-P boundary didn't have impacts so quickly (they mainly followed from the consequent long dark winter).

People often say we are entering the Anthropocene geological era, we are not, instead it is an extinction event, meeting the formal definition because in addition to rapid biodiversity loss, it is also marked by global deposition of a boundary layer, of micro plastics, literally from pole to pole, Chumalungma to the Marianas Trench. The Anthropocene is an extinction event.

CriglCragl
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If I'm reading your question correctly, what you're asking is: If there is no life in an environment to be harmed, is it possible to cause harm by changing that environment?

There are always competing interests when it comes to any resource. The mountain that is strip mined might be, in the eyes of a researcher, a priceless source of information about planet formation. Dumping radioactive material in a site might make that site, and its resources, inaccessible or damaged beyond repair. Terraforming Mars might be seen as unethical from a scientific point of view. Failing to terraform Mars might be seen as unethical from the point of view of human expansion.

So, yes. There are ethical considerations when considering the use of uninhabited or uninhabitable extra-terrestrial locations.

philosodad
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  • Without speculation, the current state of knowledge is assumed in the question: that all life is on earth. I can’t chase down infinite “what if”s even in a philosophy forum, let alone as a question of science. It’s turtles all the way down . However “crime” is a matter of law rather than morality. – Vogon Poet Sep 14 '22 at 20:38
  • @VogonPoet "All life is on earth" is itself speculation. Regardless, your comment seems to indicate that I'm reading your question correctly and answered it. – philosodad Sep 14 '22 at 20:56
  • How does observation become speculation? We know there is life here by directly seeing (and being) it. We know things with our own eyes and probes that show no signs of it anywhere else. This is called evidence, not speculation,unless we run down the existential rabbit hole. That’s beyond the scope of ethics, which imply existence automatically. – Vogon Poet Sep 14 '22 at 22:52
  • @VogonPoet No observation made justifies the statement "all life is on earth". We can say with surety that all *observed* life is on earth, but claiming that there is *no* life in the interior of Enceladus or Europa is speculation. We simply do not know whether there is life elsewhere in the solar system. Any claim of surety one way or the other is speculation. – philosodad Sep 15 '22 at 03:14
  • “Observed.” That is exactly what I said. I only speculate about what is known, there will always be more unknowns then there are knowns. – Vogon Poet Sep 15 '22 at 03:25
  • @VogonPoet whatever man. I'll move my critique of your wording into a comment on your answer. I hope that will encourage you to engage with the substance of my answer. – philosodad Sep 15 '22 at 14:27
  • Let us [continue this discussion in chat](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/139229/discussion-between-philosodad-and-vogon-poet). – philosodad Sep 15 '22 at 15:44
  • I am not able to comment in chat. I could have placed the word "only" in the qualifier to be more clear, but obviously if the effects reach home to earth somehow then climate ethics will apply, which is I believe the substance of your answer. But then, your opening summation: "If there is no life to be harmed" disqualifies the answer you gave, even if I failed to do so with the "only" qualifier. – Vogon Poet Sep 16 '22 at 17:07
  • @VogonPoet okay, sure. Clarification added. – philosodad Sep 16 '22 at 23:04
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Climate ethics (like any other ethics) are rules we must follow in order to be able to live together in peace. "Live" implies survival (e.g. it is not ethical to kill). So, any act risking life is obviously not ethical (extreme case example, simpler to understand).

If the explosion of a nuclear reactor in the moon (your example) causes the moon to lose its orbit, we all die, so, that's not ethical. Same for Mars, possibly.

If we are sure there's no life in a distant galaxy, we might destroy one star or two without consequences, except gaining scientific knowledge (that's ethical: improves our chances of survival). But if we're not sure about life existing there, it will be unethical and not ecological to destroy those stars.

RodolfoAP
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Yes, climate ethics exist for all the available space-time and is not limited to a small planet like Earth. The core concept of Climate ethics is based on optimal consumption of energy/environmental resources and minimizing the waste based on the second law of thermodynamics.

Edit: The second law of thermodynamics measures the efficiency of a process. For example, if you want to go some miles away with your car, by a petrol car the efficiency is 20 percent, by an electric car the efficiency can be up to 95 percent. The amount of energy we need to survive for a given amount of time is also calculable. For example the efficiency of producing protein in spirulina is much higher than eggs. And egg is much more energy efficient than meat. So, climate ethic is against eating meat as a protein source.

  • How does the second law of thermodynamics define “waste” on a barren and lifeless planet, for example? – Vogon Poet Mar 16 '22 at 22:15
  • The climate ethics is not based on the existence or non-existence of life, it is based on the efficiency of energy consumption for achieving the conservation goal. The second law calculate the efficiency mathematically. To understand, we should first learn this law. It says a system (here human conservation) cannot have 100 percent efficiency and the efficiency is calculable based on the environment state. I don't wanna go in-depth in math, jus know that by learning the environment (here another planet for example) we can calculate the minimum amount of waste we must produce to conserve humans –  Mar 16 '22 at 22:30
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    How can the word “goal” be used outside a context of “life?” – Vogon Poet Mar 16 '22 at 22:45
  • That's the general ethics, not the climate one. We need general ethics to decide how many people should conserve in another planet, but when we decided, climate ethics tell us not to waste more energy than needed for our purpose. –  Mar 16 '22 at 22:51
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    You could improve your answer by explaining why you think that the second law has anything to say about how we consumer energy. – nwr Mar 16 '22 at 22:53
  • You see you are saying “for our purpose.” Your logic leads us to completely abandon all acts which take energy (like recycling) and hoard maximum thermodynamic efficiency for human needs. It argues that discarding anything we don’t need is always the ethical choice, because “recycling” requires energy, which is wasted when it doesn’t serve us. – Vogon Poet Mar 16 '22 at 22:55
  • Recycling is a part of climate ethics. Because most of the times recycling needs less energy. Of course there are edge cases that should be considered separately. –  Mar 16 '22 at 23:17
  • Is the 2nd law, moral..? – CriglCragl Aug 14 '22 at 03:29
  • @nwr: "why you think that the second law has anything to say about how we consumer energy" It defines the most efficient possible use of energy, for an isolated system approaching equilibrium. So how could it not? The 2nd law is fundamental to understanding how much energy is available to do useful work. – CriglCragl Aug 14 '22 at 03:32
  • @CriglCragl the words “useful work” placed in a conversation about lifeless systems confuses the bejesus out of me. How is “useful” even defined on, say, a cold lifeless rock spinning around a dead neutron star? “Use” implies “goals,” which are abstract concepts unique to the survival of living things. No? Can we interfere with the “goal” of a stone in dead space? Or do anything “useful” for its ambitions? – Vogon Poet Sep 14 '22 at 20:46
  • @VogonPoet: It's a term from Thermodynamics regarding available energy to do work in irreversible systems. I could also have said 'free energy' which you might have been happier with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_(thermodynamics)#Free_energy_and_exergy – CriglCragl Sep 15 '22 at 00:28