Save the Microbes

Mars is not a nice place to live. In fact, it’s so not a nice place to live, nobody lives there… yet.

Developers are looking at all the open land and considering how it could potentially be turned into a tropical deepspace getaway with parrots and bananas. A nice place for your summer home. The new Hawaii.

The infrastructure required would be massive… I mean, creating an artificial magnetosphere the size of a planet, come on!!! Hence, it’s all in the theory stage, and when something is in the theory stage it’s fair game for every critic. A group of people, called ecocentrists, have moved beyond just debating the feasibility of making Mars habitable to the ethics of such a project.

Some scientists think there is a possibility that Mars is home to aliens… or microbes… or microbial aliens. Ecocentrists argue that all forms of life NO MATTER HOW SMALL AND UNAWARE have intrinsic value. They object to the colonization of Mars because they believe it would be ethically wrong to interrupt the native bacterial lives and kill the microbes with a human-supporting atmosphere and other sciency stuff.

Look up the ethical concerns of terraforming Mars, and you’ll find statements, articles, and scholarly papers all about it.

Now I don’t have a personal problem with ecocentrists, and I’m not about to claim that they all support abortion, but my point is as follows. Our culture is up in arms about a microbe’s right to life. We can get science to define microbes as HAVING LIFE, yet in our eyes, a tiny human being DOES NOT HAVE LIFE yet.

If science would clean its sciency goggles for a minute, and actually take a look, it would see that a baby’s life at conception is not just tissue but a very advanced form of LIFE. And if a microbe has intrinsic value, and it would be ethically wrong to kill it, how much more is it wrong to kill a life form containing unique human DNA?

So if an ecocentrist or other sciency person happens to support abortion, why the double standard? Why kill children and save the microbes? Is it because abortion is necessary to control the population and give personal freedom? Or is it because they couldn’t handle the guilt if they were to now admit the 60 million victims were actually living, and they’ve ended their lives?

There is no excuse good enough to justify the continuing cruelty against children. They have intrinsic value too—more value than microbes. It is ethically wrong to kill them, no matter how small and unaware.

Standing up against abortion is unpopular and scary in today’s world, I know this. But the progress the culture worships (desegregation, equal rights, etc.) was won by bold people who were willing to fight for what is right. The heroes of the civil rights movement didn’t let anything stand in the way of defending the rights of all people. Neither should we. Instead of fighting for the rights of defenseless microbes on a far distant planet, it’s time to start by fighting for the rights of defenseless babies here at home.