Space Ethics Quotes

Supposing we knew that up there is some alien civilization and it's sending radio signals our way we should not tell the public where that is. We could say that we've picked up a signal, but we should not tell them where for the simple reason that anybody could commandeer a radio telescope, set themselves up as some self appointed spokesperson of mankind and start beaming all sorts of crazy messages back to the aliens.

You know something I could really do without? The Space Shuttle. ... It's irresponsible. The last thing we should be doing is sending our grotesquely distorted DNA out into space.

Is a one-way trip to Mars ever really seriously going to happen? Surely that's morally reprehensible. However old people are, however much they say they want to go on a one-way mission, people should be thinking about the possibility of returning.

There is a history of thinking about space science from an environmental ethics perspective. And part of what I want to do is turn that back and use that experience to see if it reflects how we think about the Earth.

Why did they come billions of miles just to stare at us? It's rude.

I'm known clean around the Earth.

In a dispassionate comparison of the relative values of human and robotic spaceflight, the only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure. But only a tiny number of Earth's six billion inhabitants are direct participants. For the rest of us, the adventure is vicarious and akin to that of watching a science fiction movie. At the end of the day, I ask myself whether the huge national commitment of technical talent to human spaceflight and the ever-present potential for the loss of precious human life are really justifiable.