Are We Trashing the Final Frontier?
"'There is an argument to be made for the intrinsic value of nature, that rocks and rivers, whether on Earth or on Mars, have an intrinsic value to them and that there should be some degree of regard for that value,' says Margaret McLean, director of Bioethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
“'We’re not going blind into this,' McLean says. Space may be uncharted territory, but we have past experiences pushing into new frontiers here on Earth to draw from. 'We are explorers, but we need to take the lessons that we’ve learned from our last place of experience with us as we explore.'"
Excerpted from an article in The Christian Science Monitor. (Photo credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/A. Nota, Westerlund 2 Science Team via AP)