Using Ancestral Species as Trailblazers

[Gil Hamilton]

I also think this scenario underestimates the quality of our analytical techniques. We've got instruments NOW that can correctly identify environmental toxins and other risks to human beings. Spacemen are going to have even better ones which are presumably flight ready and even probably ones that can test and identify possibly hazardous microbes on the surface. We can already easily test for radiation and there is no reason why we can't orbit satellites to monitor weather and geological activity before our crews prepare to make landfall. Landing some apes to see how they die seems cruel and pointless when you could land robots which could not only identify all hazards in the air, soil, flora/fauna, and water, but send back all the information in neatly organized reports rather than possibly ambiguous autopsies.