Keith,

It is not ridiculous to claim that the threat potential of Martian samples is too small to worry about. Experts with far more qualifications than Zubrin, you, or I have judged the the risk to be exremely low for reasons all three of us can understand. Our society makes judgements all the time about risks being too small to worry with. Many of them, including small NEO impacts, represent more of a threat than returning Martian samples yet have little or no funding let alone hundreds of millions of dollars in additional program costs.

While I agree with NASA's current plans, I do see the rational behind Zubrin's stance that loss of containment shouldn't result in sample destruction and that irrational fears should not result in overly complicated designs which increase risk of mission failure. However, I think it is a purely technical stance which does not take into account irrational fears and political realities.

What is ridiculous is for the planetary protection officer to state "Humans don't get dutch elm disease, but Elm trees do" in response to Zubrin's coevolution argument. There are no elm trees on Mars either. The comment is totally irrelevant to the coevolution argument because Elm trees have also coevolved with their own pathogens. I'm sure Rummel should know better.

I found numerous similar errors in the responses from experts to Zubrin in the PR which are similar in magnitude to the errors Zubrin made. When intelligent people make as many errors as I spotted in all four articles I wonder if they are fighting from dug in stances rather than debating with open minds.

The most balanced and pertinent reply was the one at
http://planetary.org/html/news/opinions/safescience.html but it still contained a rather obvious flaw in the effluent treatment example. If contamination were a big issue these treatment ponds would not be open to the air. As someone working at a chemical plant I am aware of frequent upsets, but these are usually blamed on a change in composition favoring one microbe over another, not a new microbe.

What would be ridiculous is for Zubrin to treat the resignations of BOD members as insignificant and continue on status quo.

Regards,
Mark