8 Expert Theories About Our Future In Space

5. Going To Mars Could Mess Up the Hunt for Alien Life

In light of all this talk about Mars colonies and becoming an interplanetary species, many experts have been looking at the ethical implications of sending humans off-world.

Despite our best efforts, we don't actually know what the state of life in the rest of the solar system is like. Just because we haven't found it yet doesn't mean its not there, and sending a bunch of leaky, germy human meatsacks to other worlds might just wipe it out before we get the chance. It would be like the alien invasion scenario in movies, except we're the ones carelessly tramping over the local population and wiping them out with our corrosive blood.

We used to be much more gung-ho about sending germy spacecraft to alien worlds, as we were convinced that space was so deadly and uninhabitable that anything clinging to them would be obliterated by radiation or dehydration before they could do any damage. Now, with the discovery of running water on Mars, and potentially life-supporting oceans beneath the surfaces of extraterrestrial moons, NASA are, even now, having to rethink their policies of sending probes, let alone humans, to unexplored worlds.