The most memorable bit of the discussion with Jill Tarter was the discussion about the possible contamination of human space exploration and the impact of human contact with possible extraterrestrial organisms and regions of the universe in general. This discussion prompted me to reflect on the human bias behavior recently discussed in class. Currently, an important problem we are facing is climate change and because of this, we have had a major mindset shift to acknowledging our impact on ecosystems. I wonder if climate change, a crucial problem humanity faces, will create a new bias or change current biases, possibly based on over-contamination.
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I was really interested in this part of the interview as well! You bring up a great point about the intersection of environmental concerns and human bias, and how this has affected our action around climate change-- it will be really interesting to see how this plays out in space as well. Building off of that, I'm curious about how we can plan to engage with the ecosystems of other planets in an ethical and responsible way when we don't even know what the ecosystems of these other planets are really like-- will our own experiences with climate change bias us toward certain sustainability measures that won't be as effective on other planets?