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Elon Musk, Mars, and bioethics: is sending astronauts into space ethical?
The recent crash of the largest-ever space rocket, Starship, developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, has certainly somewhat disrupted optimism about the human mission to Mars that is being prepared for the next few years. It is worth raising the issue of the safety of future participants in long-term space missions, especially missions to Mars, on the background of this disaster. And it is not just about safety from disasters like the one that happened to Musk. Protection from the negative effects of prolonged flight in zero gravity, protection from cosmic radiation, as well as guaranteeing sufficiently high crew productivity over the course of a multi-year mission also play an important role.
Fortunately, no one was killed in the aforementioned crash, as it was a test rocket alone without a crew. However, past disasters in which astronauts died, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia disasters, remind us that it is the seemingly very small details that determine life and death. So far, 15 astronauts and 4 cosmonauts have died in space flights. 11 more have died during testing and training on Earth. It is worth mentioning that space flights are peacekeeping missions, not military operations. They are carried out relatively infrequently and by a relatively small number of people.
It is also worth noting the upcoming longer and more complex human missions in the near future, such as the mission to Mars. The flight itself, which is expected to last several months, is quite a challenge, and disaster can happen both during takeoff on Earth, landing on Mars, and then on the way back to Earth. And then there are further risks that await astronauts in space.
The first is exposure to galactic cosmic radiation and solar energetic particles events, especially during interplanetary flight, when the crew is no longer protected by both Earth’s magnetic field and a possible shelter on Mars. Protection from cosmic radiation for travel to Mars is a major challenge, and 100% effective protective measures are still lacking. Another challenge remains being in long-term zero-gravity conditions during the flight, followed by altered gravity on Mars. Bone loss and muscle atrophy are the main, but not only, negative effects of being in these states. Finally, it is impossible to ignore the importance of psychological factors related to stress, isolation, being in an enclosed small space, distance from Earth.
A human mission to Mars, which could take about three years, brings with it a new type of danger not known from the previous history of human space exploration. In addition to the aforementioned amplified impact of factors already known—namely microgravity, cosmic radiation, and isolation—entirely new risk factors are emerging. One of them is the impossibility of evacuating astronauts in need back to Earth, which is possible in missions carried out at the International Space Station. It seems that even the best-equipped and trained crew may not be able to guarantee adequate assistance to an injured or ill astronaut, which could lead to her death—assuming that care on Earth would guarantee her survival and recovery. Another problem is the delay in communication, which will reach tens of minutes between Earth and Mars. This situation will affect the degree of autonomy of the crew, but also their responsibility. Wrong decisions, made under conditions of uncertainty, can have not only negative consequences for health and life, but also for the entire mission.
“It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment.”
Thus, we can see that a future human mission to Mars will be very dangerous, both as a result of factors already known but intensified, as well as new risk factors. It is worth raising the question of the ethicality of the decision to send humans into such a dangerous environment. The ethical assessment will depend both on the effectiveness of available countermeasures against harmful factors in space and also on the desirability and justification for the space missions themselves.
Military ethics and bioethics may provide some analogy here. In civilian ethics and bioethics, we do not accept a way of thinking and acting that would mandate the subordination of the welfare, rights, and health of the individual to the interests of the group. In military ethics, however, this way of thinking is accepted, formally in the name of the higher good. Thus, if the mission to Mars is a civilian mission, carried out on the basis of values inherent in civilian ethics and bioethics rather than military ethics, it may be difficult to justify exposing astronauts to serious risks of death, accident, and disease.
One alternative may be to significantly postpone the mission until breakthrough advances in space technology and medicine can eliminate or significantly reduce the aforementioned risk factors. Another alternative may be to try to improve astronauts through biomedical human enhancements. Just as in the army there are known methods of improving the performance of soldiers through pharmacological means, analogous methods could be applied to future participants in a mission to Mars. Perhaps more radical, and thus controversial, methods such as gene editing would be effective, assuming that gene editing of selected genes can enhance resistance to selected risk factors in space.
But the idea of genetically modifying astronauts, otherwise quite commonsensical, given also the cost of such a mission, as well as the fact that future astronauts sent to Mars would likely be considered representative of the great effort of all humanity, raises questions about the justification for such a mission. What do the organizers of a mission to Mars expect to achieve? Among the goals traditionally mentioned are the scientific merits of such a mission, followed by possible commercial applications for the future. Philosophers, as well as researchers of global and existential catastrophes, often discuss the concept of space refuge, in which the salvation of the human species in the event of a global catastrophe on Earth would be possible only by settling somewhere beyond Earth. However, it seems that the real goals in our non-ideal society will be political and military.
By Sinead Prince.
We’ve been discussing the possibility of genetic enhancement, and the ethics of such technology, for some time now. Many people are quite cautious about the idea of genetically modifying embryos as well as adults, but others have begun waving the green flag rigorously.
Genetic enhancement is the modification of genes using technologies such as CRISPR, for the purpose of bringing about specific kinds of physical traits e.g., blue eyes, bigger muscles, more reliable memories, and empathetic personalities. There are many questions these possibilities raise. For example, should we be modifying human nature? Is this actually good for us? Can we distribute this technology fairly?
It is the last question that I am concerned with. Proponents and critics of genetic enhancements alike argue that this can be done. Some argue that we will eventually distribute genetic enhancements, like all other technologies, through trickle down economics. Others argue that governments will actively distribute genetic enhancements equally because such technologies will boost productivity and therefore the economy. Others argue that we might be able to distribute genetic enhancements in such a way as to mitigate social or economic disadvantage.
The fundamental problem with all these solutions and ideas is that they misunderstand how genes produce physical traits. The process by which genes produce physical traits is complex and still not entirely understood. However, one important process is the gene-environment interaction. Our environments can directly impact our physical traits by, for example: physically changing our DNA sequences, activating or inactivating specific genes, or intervening in the chemical environment that is responsible for instructing our DNA to make proteins.
These environments are relevant to genetic enhancements. For example, although we cannot choose our parents, our skin colour, or our childhood environments, these all directly impact our physical traits including our cognitive abilities and capacities to manage stress. Our socioeconomic class also directly and indirectly impacts our physical traits. Those with low socioeconomic class, for instance, age faster than their chronological age. They also experience a disproportionate burden of morbidity, poor exercise, increased alcohol and tobacco consumption, and poor diets, all of which are known environments that produce pathological changes to our physical traits. Furthermore, they lack the same opportunities to express and exercise certain physical traits, such as quality education, and extracurricular activities.
We have also begun to realise how some environments actually produce better outcomes when they interact with specific genes. For example, better responses to social feedback and better skill development.
Even if we all had access to genetic enhancements, those subject to social, racial, and economic inequalities, will still suffer the same pathological changes to their physical traits. They might still technically have the ‘smart’ or ‘music’ genes, but if they cannot also enjoy an adversity-free childhood or go to quality schools on a regular basis, or access musical lessons, they will not enjoy the same physical traits as their peers. Those with positive environments will therefore not only enjoy the benefits of being ‘smart’, but will not experience pathological changes to the very genes that were enhanced. Equal access to genetic enhancement will not produce a fair distribution of the intended benefits of genetic enhancements. We don’t know the exact extent of such inequality, but we do know that if we seek to justify genetic enhancements on the grounds that they can be fairly distributed, the distribution of such physical traits cannot arise without social change.
Even proposals to distribute enhancements to compensate those suffering from inequality, such as by only enhancing them with ‘smart’ genes or giving them ‘resilient’ genes to change, are not straightforward. First, how does being smart compensate for a life of inequality and exclusion? If you are smart, but still cannot go to school because of socioeconomic inequality, you cannot express such enhancements and develop your physical traits. Second, enhancing people to be resilient to inequality does not justify the inequality they continue to suffer. Being cognitively enhanced is not moral compensation for suffering racism. If ensuring equality of physical traits is the aim in our ethical reasoning, removing the inequalities that already pathologically interfere with people’s genes is our first priority.
The gene-environment interaction will prevent any method of distribution from arising as intended. This means that no matter which way we distribute enhancement to achieve fairness, the inequality from our social, racial, and economic environments will always prevent such outcomes from arising. Furthermore, such distribution will exacerbate inequalities by improving the genes of those already privileged with positive environments.
The gene-environment interaction is missing from debates about the distribution of genetic enhancements. This undermines the argument that genetic enhancements are morally permissible because they can be distributed fairly. This is not to say we must ban genetic enhancements, but to show how we can achieve equality, by removing barriers that cause people to experience disadvantage and harm in the first place.
Paper title: The gene-environment interaction: Why genetic enhancement might never be distributed fairly
Author: Sinead Prince
Affiliations: Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Queensland University of Technology
Competing interests: None
Social media accounts of post author: @sinead_prince
The post Why we can almost guarantee that genetic enhancement will never be fairly distributed appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
“If philosophy relies too heavily on rejection rates as a measure for journal quality or prestige, we run the risk of further degrading the quality of peer review.”
In the following post, Toby Handfield, Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, and Kevin Zollman, Professor of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, explain why they believe the common practice of using journal rejection rates as a proxy for journal quality is bad.
This is the second in a series of weekly guest posts by different authors at Daily Nous this summer.
[Mel Bochner, “Counting Alternatives: The Wittgenstein Illustrations” (selections)]
Ask any philosopher about the state of publishing in academic philosophy and they will complain. Near the top of the list will be the quality of reviews (they’re poor) and rejection rates (they’re high). Indeed, philosophy does have extremely high rejection rates relative to other fields. It’s extremely hard to understand why we have such high rejection rates. Perhaps there is simply more low-quality work in philosophy than other fields. Or, perhaps, rejection rates are themselves something that philosophy journals strive to maintain. Many journals strive to publish only the very best work within their purview, and perhaps they use their rejection rates to show themselves that they are succeeding.
Like many fields, philosophy also has an implicit hierarchy of journals. Of course, people disagree at the margins, but there seems to be widespread agreement among anglophone philosophers (at least) about what counts as a top 5 or top 10 journal. Looking at some (noisy) data about rejection rates, it does appear that the most highly regarded journals have high rejection rates. So, while we complain about rejection rates, we also seem to—directly or indirectly—reward journals that reject often.
It is quite natural to use rejection rates as a kind of proxy for the quality of the journal, especially in a field like philosophy where other qualitative and quantitative measures of quality are somewhat unreliable. We think it is quite common for philosophers to use the rejection rates of journals as a proxy for paper quality when thinking about hiring, promotion, and tenure. It’s impressive when a graduate student has published in The Philosophical Review, in large part because The Philosophical Review rejects so many papers. Rejection rates featured prominently—among many other things—in the recent controversy surrounding the Journal of Political Philosophy.
We, along with co-author Julian García, argue that this might be a dangerous mistake. (This paper is forthcoming in Philosophy of Science—a journal that, we feel obligated to point out, has a high rejection rate.) Our basic argument is that as journals become implicitly or explicitly judged by their rejection rates, the quality of peer review will go down, thus making journals worse. We do so by using a formal model, but the basic idea is not hard to understand.
We start by asking a very basic question: what is it that a journal is striving to achieve? We consider two alternatives: (1) that the journal is trying to maximize the average quality of its published papers or (2) that the journal is trying to maximize its rejection rate. The journal must decide both what threshold counts as good enough for their journal and also how much effort to invest in peer review. They can always make peer review better, but it comes at a cost (something that is all too familiar).
This already shows why judging journals by rejection rates can potentially be quite harmful. If a journal is merely striving to maximize its rejection rate, it doesn’t much care who it rejects. So, it has less incentive to invest in high quality peer review than does a journal that is judged by the average quality of papers in the journal. After all, if a journal only cares about rejection rates, it doesn’t much matter if a rejected paper was good or bad.
This already is probably sufficient to give one pause, but it actually gets much worse. In that quick argument, we implicitly assumed that there was a fixed population of authors who mindlessly submitted to the journal, hoping to get lucky. However, in the real world, authors might be aware of their chance of acceptance and choose not to submit if they regard the effort as not worth the cost.
A journal editor who wants to maintain a high rejection rate now has a problem. If they are too selective, authors of bad papers might opt not to submit, and a paper that isn’t submitted can’t be rejected. If a journal very predictably rejects papers below a given standard, their rejection rates will go down because authors of less good papers will know they don’t stand a chance of being accepted. A journal editor who cares about their journal’s rejection rate will then be motivated to tolerate more error in its peer review process in order to give authors a fighting chance to be accepted. They use their unreliable peer review as a carrot to encourage authors to submit, which in turn allows the journal to keep their rejection rates high.
We consider several variations on our model to demonstrate how this result is robust to different ways that authors might be incentivized to publish in different journals. We would encourage the interested reader to look at the details in the paper.
Of course, our method is to use simplified models, and in doing so we run the risk that a simplification might be driving the results. Most concerning, in our mind, is that our model features a world with only one journal. Philosophy has multiple journals, although in some fields of philosophy a single journal might dominate the area as the premier outlet for work in that area. Future work would need to determine if this is a critical assumption, although our guess is that it is not.
Although we don’t investigate this in our paper, we think that the process we identify might also exist in other selection processes like college and graduate school admission or hiring. In the US, colleges often advertise the selectivity of their admissions process, and we suspect that they face the same perverse incentives we identify.
Whether you share our intuition about this or not, we think the process we identify is concerning. If philosophy relies too heavily on rejection rates as a measure for journal quality or prestige, we run the risk of further degrading the quality of peer review. We think it is potentially problematic that journals sometimes advertise their rejection rates, lest it contribute to rejection rates being a sought after mark of prestige. Furthermore, we think it’s important that philosophy as a discipline walk back its use of rejection rates as a proxy for journal quality. To the extent that we are doing that now, it may actually serve to undermine the very thing we are hoping to achieve.
The post Rejection Rates Should Not Be a Measure of Journal Quality (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Modern "word processing" programs can do everything from check spelling and grammar to finishing your sentences for you. This might be convenient for the creator, but some "helpful" upgrades can wreak havoc for manuscript editors. In today's Guest Post, Bruce Rosenblum and Sylvia Izzo Hunter explore the pitfalls of making the comments features less editor friendly.
The post Guest Post — Modern Comments and Their Discontents: When an Update Isn’t an Improvement appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Don’t question Angela Davis’ manuscript, Toni Morrison warned her publishing colleagues. Davis was not “Jane Fonda” but, rather, “Jean d’Arc.”
The post Morrison and Davis: Radicalizing Autobiography appeared first on Public Books.
Enlarge / The Nicobar pigeon, the dodo's closest living relative, is quite a bit smaller and capable of flight. (credit: Samuel Hambly / EyeEm)
Colossal is a company that got its start with a splashy announcement about plans to do something that many scientists consider impossible with current technology, all in the service of creating a product with no clear market potential: the woolly mammoth. Since that time, the company has settled into a potentially viable business model and set its sights on a species where the biology is far more favorable: the thylacine, a marsupial predator that went extinct in the early 1900s.
Today, the company is announcing a third de-extinction target and its return to the realm of awkward reproductive biology that will force the project to clear many technical hurdles: It hopes to bring back the dodo.
The dodo was a large (up to 1 meter tall), flightless bird that evolved on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. As European sailors reached the islands, it quickly became a source of food for them and the invasive species that accompanied them. It went extinct within a century of the first descriptions reaching Europe.
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