Team:Exeter/HP/ELSA
Methods of Investigating Human Practices
We decided early on that the most direct stakeholders in our project were experts in a variety of different fields. Interviewing these people was the best way to get informed and valuable opinions. We did not perform surveys or interact with the public at large for two reasons: We did not have the resources or the expertise carry these out, especially considering our lack of access a random samples of people. We would only be able to survey our fellow university students, which we knew would introduce its own biases. Additionally, our project (and specifically bioreactor) would not be interacting directly in people’s lives, but would be a part of a mission to Mars that select people would be involved in. The people working towards this mission and in the space industry were the most relevant community of stakeholders.
The first expert we talked to was Sarah Hartley, a specialist in science communication and responsible research and innovation (RRI), from the Exeter Business School. She briefed us on what makes good human practices and RRI, telling us to converse with our stakeholders through the entirety of the project, and giving us several paradigms to view our project, ELSA, SEG, and AREA.
- ELSA stands for Ethical, Legal, and Social Aspects.
- SEG stands for Safe, Ethical, and Good for the world.
- AREA stands for Anticipate, Reflect, Engage and Act.
Reasons for ELSA Approach
We decided ELSA was the most suitable framework for our project because we wanted to investigate the potential ethical, legal and social aspects of our project, not just its implications as the ELSA framework may imply. We decided not to follow the SEG or AREA frameworks because they were unsuitable for our specific project. AREA relied on a level of engagement with end users that was not available to us being that there are no human inhabitants on Mars to engage with. The framework emphasises innovation in response to everyday life issues and our project would involve concepts that would appear nebulous to stakeholders and the general public until manned missions became closer in date and more evidently feasible. The AREA framework was appropriate for the 2017 Exeter iGEM team as their stakeholders included responding to the worries of people directly affected by the leaching of heavy metals into groundwater in the South West and the water companies they anticipated would need their Pili+ system as a form of bioremediation. SEG, in contrast, was too general; our project would affect so much more than just our world, the environmental ethics of Mars have not been investigated enough to definitively question if space study, travel and colonisation are ethical and questioning the safety of the project could never assuage the inherent dangers of space travel. Our technology could be foundational to new areas of exploration, and looking at the legal implications and precedents is necessary in investigating its possible socio political effects. We believe our explorations in human practices have included aspects of SEG and AREA but ELSA, in the context of our project, encompasses them all.
What We Learnt:
When attempting to contact notable space agencies and identify how they evaluated their work, we found a lack of questioning in the motivations of space exploration. This was a question we asked ourselves during the initial conception of our project and were concerned it wasn’t a more explicit aspect. This proves to be a systemic issue in science where the future of the work seems to be an afterthought as opposed to an integral part of the research itself. For this reason we decided to investigate the influences and motivations of those who are making strides in the space industry and have the potential to influence the future of humanity.
Our research found that the main ethical debates on Mars focused on terraformation, the assumption for most arguments was that the whole planet would be colonised for the human species.
With greater time allowances, we would have conducted an investigation into the motivations behind interplanetary study and consequently, colonisation of such planets. The intended work would be a survey to scientists, researchers and academics that advance the field of space exploration via several space agencies and societies. The survey’s aim would be to identify and understand the opinions of individuals on the environmental ethics of studying and colonising Mars based on the three axioms, defined by Dr Chris McKay (1991) as the following: intrinsic worth, wise stewardship and preservationism.
The survey would include matrix style questions with statements such as “humans should have the right to travel to Mars” with the responses ranging from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree”. Every question would be weighted based on the three axioms mentioned above and each question would contribute to an individual score for each axiom ranging from one to ten. This would place the participant on the three axis plot amongst a subset of opinions including as shown below:
(insert scatter plot)
In our discussions with Dr Sarah Hartley, when trying to identify the relevant stakeholders to engage with we found space colonisation was not yet a major public concern and any data collections would not be representative samples of populations within the general public.
Therefore, in addition to the survey, we would have liked to conduct focus groups with university students from different disciplines to identify if there were prevailing opinions within particular disciplines, amongst other trends. The focus group would involve participants taking a survey, not dissimilar to the one taken by academics and researchers, before and after a group discussion. The discussion would be initiated by a stimuli relevant to the topic, i.e. a quote, statistic or video. We would analyse the content of conversations, categorising the topics under the ELSA framework to identify how our project could respond to concerns and find if particular concepts arose from the same disciplines. The responses from the students in STEM disciplines would be compared to the academic surveys using chi-squared and t-tests.
To investigate the legal aspect of our project, we interviewed astronauts and logistics experts such as Libby Jackson, a flight director and programme manager at the UK Space Agency. We asked her about her priorities in planning space travel and what legal framework is applicable in space. We found that the laws applying to space are similar to those governing the polar regions, in which no one country or company would be able to lay claim to land. In accordance with planetary protection laws, all contact with alien substances occurs within two way closed systems, this would mean no materials or organisms from Earth would be exposed to the Martian environment but contained in the bioreactor. The same would apply to any materials taken from Mars, in this way, there would be a mitigated risk of biocontamination. This would have to change in order to effectively explore a planet where there is a possibility of life existing, such as Mars. There is also a lack of consideration of synthetic biological systems, such as those being developed by NASA, the ESA, and our iGEM team, within the current legal framework.
You can read a report written about the legal implications of putting genetically modified bacteria on Mars here.
We consulted social scientists about our project regarding the hopes and concerns that the publics have expressed about space travel. We considered performing a survey, but on realizing our limited access to a truly random sample and the difficulty of removing bias from our survey, we decided to question people who observe societal trends. These included Paul Williams, who we interviewed about science fiction, and Ewan Woodley about science communication. Williams informed us that people are not opposed to space travel, but they would rather it not be at the expense of other governmental duties, suggesting that it would ideally be funded by private investment. With respect to finding life in space, he compared “nice” aliens with the aliens we’re more likely to find nearby: bacteria and viruses. "Nice" aliens depicted in literature are easy to communicate with; they think, feel, and are usually vaguely humanoid. However, depictions of aliens like “The Blob” epitomize people’s anxieties about an alien virus, which would infect and kill indiscriminately while being impossible to reason with.
We noticed that, while academics seem to be worried about us killing alien life, the media often portrays the narrative of aliens killing us. Ewan Woodley suggested that how people are trained to think, specifically their type of education, would drastically change how they think about space exploration. He suggested that social scientists would draw historical parallels with colonialism, while STEM students would be more data driven.
In interviewing Andy Weir, author of "The Martian", we found his inspiration for "The Martian" was in part due to the “virtuous cycle” of interest in space resulting in more media interest, subsequently resulting in more interest in space exploration and so on. This was also noticed by Libby Jackson that the recent upturn in media representation of space travel both fictional (films such as "The Martian" and "Gravity") and real (Tim Peake's time on the ISS) has resulted in a consistent upturn in space relevant internet searches and applications for jobs in space related industry.