When we think of commercial initiatives in space, the question of legal rights for them is very important. Anyone who invests major sums of money in an activity wants to make sure that they will not lose their investments because it turns out afterwards that they did not have the right to the resources they extract. It is also important to have laws in place that regulate the relations between different companies from different countries, bound by different laws in their home countries, but trying to coexist in space.
There are also questions of coexisting with other players with other agendas, such as the scientific community. It can be expected that space research and commercial space projects will prove to be very useful for each other. There will, however, also be points of conflict. One of them will be planetary protection, i.e., measures aimed at avoiding biological contamination resulting from human space activities. We have not yet discovered any life on Mars or any other extraterrestrial body, but it is not a very controversial assumption that the time will come for us to exploit the resources on a potentially inhabited world in space, or to establish it as a tourist destination. When this happens, we will see conflicts between those who think that we have looked for life long enough on the world in question and that it is now time to give the green light for development, and those who think that there is still a chance there might be life that we should not endanger.
It all depends on the values at stake, of course. If we assume that extraterrestrial life only has value as a study object, it might be very difficult to resist exploitation even if it potentially puts indigenous life at risk. Economic value is privileged by our society, and when the value of knowledge as such is set against economic value, the former usually loses.
An alternative possibility is that extraterrestrial life, in addition to its value as a study object, also has economic value. Just like with the value as a study object, this is also a form of instrumental value: Something has economic value because it can generate money. Can extraterrestrial life have instrumental value in this way, and what does it mean for the relations between astrobiology, commercial interests, and planetary protection if it does?
Charles Cockell mentions bioengineering as an example. He distinguishes between the economic value of extraterrestrial life that is related to us compared to if it is not related to us. This makes good sense. It is easy to imagine that a microbe that is genetically well adapted to life on another world might contain adaptations that we will want to insert into earth bacteria and use for different purposes. In such cases, it clearly makes things easier if they are genetically related. If they are, we will be able to transfer the properties in question to earth life by transferring the relevant genes from extraterrestrial microbes to earth microbes. Interesting properties could include the ability to survive high doses of radiation, which might be useful if we want to engineer microbes to do work inside a nuclear reactor, disaster area, or aboard a spaceship traveling from Earth to Mars. An ability to extract energy from the Sun in a very efficient way is another example of a useful property that might be found in microbial life on worlds further from the Sun.
If we find extraterrestrial life that has value as a resource for bioengineering, the aims of science and business will actually converge when it comes to planetary protection. But in the long run, the value of extraterrestrial life as study objects and as resources for bioengineering may make different demands on the timespan during which they have to be protected. Which type of value will be more demanding is not possible to say before we have actually found them.
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