J’atorg struggled along on his motile pods, wheezing badly as his air sacs fought with the new atmosphere. He cursed the humans, invoking the gods of his people. Reflecting, he cursed the humans by invoking their gods. The gods of his people had proven weak: the bipeds had come and were remaking his world to suit them, proving their gods are stronger. The humans said it would take a long time for the world to fully change, but J’atorg could already see, taste and smell the differences. He did not know who he hated more: the hard-eyed humans who were destroying his world or the soft-eyed humans who spewed words about “rights”, “morality” and “lawsuits” while urging patience. He knew his people would die, aside from those the humans kept as curiosities or preserved to assuage their conscience with cruel pity.
Terraforming is transforming a planet to make it more earthlike. In science fiction, the goal of terraforming is to make an alien world suitable for human habitation by altering its ecosystem. Interestingly, the ruling classes are busy seeing to the reverse terraforming of our home world, making it less habitable for our species. Since this process would radically change a world, terraforming does raise ethical concerns. Conveniently, the ethical discussion that follows applies to both terraforming and reverse terraforming.
From a moral standpoint, the clearest scenario is when a lifeless, uninhabited planet is terraformed. If Mars is lifeless and uninhabited, it would fall into this category. If there are no beings on a world, there would be no rights violated and no harms inflicted. As such, terraforming such a planet would seem morally acceptable.
One obvious counter is to argue that a planet has moral status of its own, distinct from that of the beings that might inhabit it. Intuitively, the burden of proof for this status would rest on those who make this claim since inanimate objects do not seem to be the sort of entities that can be wronged.
A second counter is to advance potentiality arguments, somewhat akin to those used in the abortion debate. If a planet might someday give rise to beings who would have moral status, then terraforming the planet would be wrong because it would prevent them from arising. After all, the scientific account of life on earth involves it arising from non-life by natural processes. If an uninhabited world is terraformed, the possible inhabitants that might have arisen from the world would never be.
While arguments from potentiality tend to be weak, they are not without appeal. Naturally, the moral concern for the world should be proportional to how likely it is that it would produce inhabitants. If this is unlikely, then terraforming would be of less moral concern. However, if the world has considerable potential, then the possibility of moral harm is greater. To reverse the situation, we would not have wanted earth to be transformed by aliens if doing so would have prevented our eventual evolution. As such, to act morally, we would need to treat other worlds as we want our world to be treated. That said, our ruling class is ensuring that our world is undergoing reverse terraforming.
The standard counter to potentiality arguments is that mere potential does not morally outweigh the actual. This is used to justify the use of resources now even when doing so will make them unavailable to future generations. It is also the reasoning that is sometimes used to morally justify abortion, with the actual person outweighing the potential person. This view does, of course, have its own problems and there are serious arguments regarding the status of the potential versus that of the actual.
If a world has life or is otherwise inhabited (I do not want to assume that all inhabitants must be alive in the way we understand it), then the morality of terraforming would be much more complicated. After all, the inhabitants of a world would seem likely to have moral status. Not surprisingly, the ethics of terraforming an inhabited world are like those of altering an environment on earth, such as building houses in what was a forest. Naturally enough, the stock arguments about species extinction would apply here. As on earth, the more complex the inhabitants, the greater the moral concern—assuming that moral status is linked to complexity. After all, we do not balk at eliminating viruses or bacteria but are sometimes concerned when higher forms of life are at stake, such as owls or our fellow humans.
If the inhabitants are people, then the matter is even more complicated and would bring into play the usual arguments about how people should be treated. Despite the ethical similarities to these smaller scale scenarios, there are some important differences when it comes to terraforming ethics.
One main difference is one of scale: bulldozing a forest to build condos versus changing an entire planet for colonizing. The fact that the entire world is involved seems morally significant—assuming size matters.
There is also another difference, namely that the world is a different world. On earth, we can at least present some an ownership claim over our home world. Asserting ownership over an alien world is more problematic, especially if it is already inhabited. But it must be noted that there are moral arguments against claiming to own parts of our earth.
Of course, it can be countered that we are inhabitants of this universe and hence have as good a claim to alien worlds as our own—after all, it is our universe. Also, there are all sorts of clever moral justifications for ownership that people have developed, and these can be applied to ownership of alien worlds. After all, the moral justifications for taking land from other humans can be inflicted on aliens. To be consistent we would have to accept that the same arguments would morally justify aliens doing the same to us. Or we could simply go with a galactic state of nature where profit is the measure of right and matters are decided by the sword. In that case, we must hope that we have the biggest sword or that the aliens have better ethics than we do.
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