The ethical relevance of earth-like extrasolar planets

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 303-314

  Cockell, Charles S ^a  

^a OPEN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 33748283144     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200628319     Document Type: Review

References (20)

1. Michel Mayor, Pierre-Yves Frei, and Boud Roukema, New Worlds in the Cosmos: The Discovery of Extrasolar Planets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2. These missions will involve telescopes launched into space, in the case of the TPF, many of such telescopes will be linked together to create the resolving power to see Earth-sized planets, and photograph them directly.
3. Water, carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases can also be determined from spectra, giving broad compositional data on the atmospheres of these planets.
4. See J. Baird Callicott, "Moral Considerability and Extraterrestrial Life," in Eugene C. Hargrove, ed., Spaceship Earth, Environmental Ethics and the Solar System (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986). Baird Callicott discusses the history of exobiology and describes views on the treatment of extraterrestrial life, if we find it in the Solar System. A distinction between his analysis and the one made here is that we may never actually directly see life on extrasolar planets.
5. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 216.
6. Callicott, "Moral Considerability and Extraterrestrial Life," pp. 246-47.
7. The best discussion of this concept of life is to be found in Albert Schweitzer's book, The Philosophy of Civilization, trans. by C. T. Campion (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1987). He describes how he developed his notion of "reverence for life" in the book, originally published in 1933, Out of My Life and Thought (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998).
8. Albert Schweitzer, "The Ethics of the Reverence for Life," in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976), pp. 133-38.
9. Albert Schweitzer, Animal Rights and Human Obligations 1976), pp. Ibid., p. 137
10. Charles S. Cockell, "The Value of Microorganisms," Environmental Ethics 27 (2005): 375-90.
11. Eugene C. Hargrove, Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), pp. 108-36.
12. Holmes Rolston, III, "The Preservation of Natural Value in the Solar System," in Hargrove, Spaceship Earth, p. 171.
13. See also the suggestions for the preservation of abiotic objects in the Solar System by I. Almár, "What could COSPAR do to Protect the Planetary and Space Environment?" Advances in Space Research 30 (2002): 1577-81.
14. Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects ( Los Altos, Calif.: Kaufmann Press, 1974). Stone considers inanimate objects on Earth, but his discussions could apply to extraterrestrial objects (albeit they are not embedded within an ecosystem in the way that Stone's abiotic features are on Earth).
15. Gary Varner, "Biocentric Individualism," in David Schmidtz and Elizabeth Willott, eds., Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 108-20.
16. Leopold, "Thinking Like a Mountain," in Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, pp. 129-33.
17. When Leopold implores us to "think like a mountain" his purpose was to help us understand that we should view the natural world from the viewpoint of the natural world. So it seems appropriate that if we want to view the Earth's biosphere through the eyes of something that has also seen extrasolar biospheres, and sees life in a universal context, we could describe this as "thinking like an extraterrestrial. "
18. Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1977).
19. See also T. A. Heppenheimer, Colonies in Space (Pittsburgh: Stackpole Books, 1977).
20. Deciding whether we should plan to colonize extrasolar planets is important, as the mere idea to colonize them might drive technological developments that ultimately cause us to actually do it.