JF Mezei wrote:

On 2017-04-30 03:44, Fred J. McCall wrote:

'Most'? You're the master of understatement. It is ALL fantasy and
not even good fantasy.


You're the one making the claim your are certain there is no risk at all.


No, I'm the one making the claim that there is so little risk that
going nuts and quarantining Mars forever because it's somehow
different than the Moon makes little sense.


I was merely providing theoretical possibilities where something we
don't know about, something we don't detect or fully understand might
behave very differently in humans or once brought back to earth.


Like I said; fantasy. If something is so 'foreign' that we can't
detect it, then it's so foreign that it won't interact with us at all.
Even extremophile bacteria here on Earth do not infect human beings.
Why do you think that is?

Hint: Evolved in environments far from those containing humans.


Just because something doesn't react with NaCl on Mars because there
isn't any doesn't mean that its chemical composition won't react to NaCl
if in contact with it.


Actually, yeah, it pretty much does.


(using salt as example, could be any component - however salt is a big
one because if some organism starts to break NaCl from ocean water in
large amounts, we might end up with acidic oceans, or pure chlorine in
atmposphere or whatever.


Uh, you realize that salt in solution is ALREADY broken up into sodium
and chlorine ions, yeah? So there's nothing to dissociate, yeah?


And even though the odds of it happening are next to nil, the potential
damage is so high that it cannot be dismissed.


Of course it can. Only a total scientific illiterate could believe
there is any threat of damage from something like this.


Or course, Mars missions have other dangers. Consider a standard cold
virus on board which mutates due to radiation, comes back to earth and
causes Sars 2. But this would be more likely detectable (since crew
would have had plenty of time to get infected and show symptoms well
before arriving at earth).


Consider ... MAGIC! That's pretty much what you're proposing here.


--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson