Deeper Space
Is it ethical?
As of right now Humans do not have the technology to travel into interstellar space. The question then arises, when will we be ready? Say in 1000 years humans had developed a spaceship so advanced it was able to travel extremely close to the speed of light. If Humans developed a ship like this, interstellar travel could become feasible. This is because the 12.5 light year journey discussed before would actually take 12.5 years. This is in no way a short amount of time but is much better than the alternative. However, a trip like this could end very poorly for the residents of the ship. There are two ways this type of travel would hypothetically happen. One is crew members are cryogenically frozen.
As of right now Humans have no idea how to freeze someone and bring them back to life. The second option is to allow the crew members to live a normal day to day life on the ship for 12.5 years. If the ship could somehow support them in terms of resources, there is still another potential issue, this is the maintenance of the crews sanity. To better understand why this is a problem, is by looking at the stanford prison experiment. This experiment sent students of stanford into a makeshift prison, with half assigned to be guards and the other half prisoners at random. The power the guards had quickly went to their heads and caused them to seriously mistreat the prisoners causing mental breakdowns to occur. This mistreatment only worsened as the experiment progressed until it was ended in only six days. Although the conditions are not exactly the same this deterioration of a group of people within a confined space over a period of time could result in the same outcome. This is especially true because the people aboard the spacecraft have to get along for 12.5 years compared to a measly six days. The people aboard the ship must also face the fact they won’t return for at least 25 years and some may not return at all. This would have a huge impact on a person's psychological state. So even if Humans could make the journey it brings up the question, should we?
More information on the Stanford Prison Experiment
Is Deep Space Travel Ethical?
When thinking of traveling into deep space, there are definitely ethical questions that arise. Who would go on these expeditions? Who would govern them? Would we live on habitable planets upon developing technology able to reach them? Who would live on these planets? So on and so forth. Exploring deep space is a whole new world that we as a society don’t really know a whole lot about. For example, if we as a human race set out to another planet suspected of being habitable and we come across an extraterrestrial species, what is the procedure? Do we have an ethical obligation to preserve the environment of other planets? New legislature would definitely have to be enacted before we even begun our expedition to explore the deep abyss we know as space. Technology and developing research about space itself are the real limiting factors of the space travel world; without the means to travel to these far away planets and the knowledge of what’s out in space, the government has no reason to even start to think of some answers to these questions of ethical concern. Right now, it’s just too early to definitively deem space travel ethical or not without honestly setting boundaries and guidelines.
What do you think?
How do you feel about the topic?