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Foreword
The science of astrobiology may be understood as a book with four chapters: the origin, evolution, distribution and destiny of life in the universe. Astrobiology’s still unfinished first chapter emerged mainly from the work of Alexander Oparin (1894–1980) and other organic chemists. They gave rise to the subdiscipline of astrobiology that was called chemical evolution, a scientific approach to the origin of life on Earth. NASA was established in 1958. Since then, the young space agency encouraged space exploration of the Solar System: their efforts, together with the space agencies that came after them, could lead to at least a single additional example of life in our cosmic neighborhood. This would be the beginning of a second chapter of astrobiology—the evolution of life in the universe. A preliminary development, a third chapter of astrobiology, was due to the molecular biologist and Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg (1925–2008). He raised the question of the origin of life, not as a terrestrial phenomenon, but rather as a cosmic distribution of life. A fourth chapter, the destiny of life in the universe, is a different inspiring topic. For getting off the ground, it will need interdisciplinary interactions at the frontier of astrobiology and humanism.
The eighteen chapters of Astrobiology: Science, Ethics and Public Policy attempt to fill a gap in the current literature on the continuing growth of this new science of life in the cosmos. Even though astrobiology has made remarkable progress, the humanistic neighbors across its cultural frontiers are only at the beginning of confronting the problem of other life. A specific neighboring humanistic area is a main concern of the present book. It has been called alternatively astroethics, or astrobioethics. We will adopt the latter denomination, following the suggestion of the 2016 International Working Group on Astrobioethics.
As suggested by the present book, there are two time-honored philosophic subdisciplines that will be relevant for progress in astrobiology. Firstly, ethics, which goes back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (c. 340 BC). The other one, political philosophy, has its roots in the best known of Plato’s dialogues, Republic (c. 375 BC). Ethics covers questions such as culture, religion and human-nonhuman relations. But our main interest regards especially human-nonhuman relations, since they concern not only public policy, but the future of astrobiology itself. To be fair to the society we live in, we need the assistance of government to ensure that justice is implemented, so that our rights, and those of others, are respected. Then, we should return to political philosophy to guide us in enquiries on public policy:
What are the right policies for implementing public power in order to respect, preserve, and improve the quality of life on Earth, and elsewhere?
Governments have the vocation to face difficult decisions concerning the distribution of limited public funds that are available to the State. One aspect of this obligation is the support of big science. The main example goes back to the middle of the last century. It involves physics of high energies with their large accelerators. More recently, astrobiology has been inserted into this restricted group, whose most urgent expenses are due to Solar System exploration. Once again, political philosophy comes to our aid regarding the enormous long-term decisions that our expenses force upon public offices. For instance, if we commit ourselves to terraforming in the Red Planet, this activity presents us with a clear-cut question that begs for a political answer. Even closer to the present, though, governments will face the economic exploitation of the Moon, Mars and the asteroids. For these activities we may profit from an earlier analogous multinational experience that has already been addressed with the exploitation of the Antarctic.
Similarly, we are becoming aware that spacefaring nations, with their corresponding space agencies, will need to take possession of new resources pacifically, according to the UN’s Outer Space Treaty. Consequently, political agreement is necessary within the United Nations Organization. All space agencies, which are capable of space exploration, should respect UN agreements: the European Union, the United States of America, Russia, Japan, China and India. More recently, other national agencies have come to the foreground, including Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Clearly, political philosophy may come again to our aid.
In a different line of thinking, philosophical studies of morality serve as a basis for extending ethics into considerations that are forced upon us by the eventual understanding of the distribution of life in the universe. In this case the term “neighbor” takes a new, deeper, inspiring, unexpected and unprecedented philosophical significance. We generally accept the principle of equality as a proper ethical basis for relations with other human beings. But with Peter Singer in Practical Ethics (1979), we are aware that the principle of equality is also a proper ethical basis for the more restricted question of human-nonhuman relations on Earth. A very remarkable example of an animal that we should keep in mind—the dolphin—was singled out by the neuroscientist Lori Marino: she found that the rate of encephalization (variation in relative brain size) in the hominid line may have been matched by this marine mammal’s encephalization as recently as only one million years ago. But independent of this special evolutionary factor, all nonhuman animals should be encompassed, without exception, in our ethical codes. But our search for other manifestations of the phenomenon of life ranges from microbial evolution in the Solar System to the evolution of intelligence in worlds elsewhere in our galaxy. Thus, a bigger, inevitable and evident question in morality cannot be avoided:
With nonhuman species, on Earth and elsewhere, how far should we extend our ethical codes?
In agreement with Edward Osborne Wilson in Consilience (1998), the origin of ethics is not a religious debate between believers and non-believers, but rather between “transcendentalists,” those of us who believe that ethical precepts (such as justice and human rights) are independent of human experience, and “empiricists,” who believe that ethical principles are human inventions. In what follows we shall understand how, for astrobioethics, both sides of this debate are fruitfully complementary.
Even though we have already underlined that independent of any theological consideration, the main debate on ethics is between transcendentalists and empiricists, nevertheless we must not exclude, but instead we should pay special attention to some religious aspects both of morality and public policy. Independent of any ethical system, our Judeo-Christian traditions contain writings that are remarkable from an ethical point of view, as they address fundamental questions. An outstanding example is Jesus’ The Sermon on the Mount (Mathew, 5,1-14, written c. 85 AD), which is inserted in a long biblical tradition (Psalm 1 and Jeremiah 17,7).
On the other hand, as astrobiologists we are mainly concerned with an empirical approach to ethics. Its insertion in science goes back to Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1875). This work offers a rationalization of the origin of ethics. Since the second half of the last century, the application of Darwinian theory to social behavior—sociobiology—has taught us how ethical behavior, as well as astrobioethics, can be given solid scientific bases. Consequently, under empiricism, progress in the search for life in the universe is bound to induce us to abandon the idea that ethics is uniquely human.
However, we should keep in mind the other major approach to ethics. In philosophy, from Socrates to Singer, there is a long history of transcendentalism. The following short selection of outstanding contributions clearly illustrates this remark: John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689), David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Immanuel Kant’s The Categorical Imperative (1785), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s The Philosophy of Right (1831), George Edward Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), and John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971).
With these major philosophical