The Legal Vacuum
Nobody Has Solved

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 is the foundational document of international space law. Signed by 114 nations, it establishes Mars — like all celestial bodies — as the province of all mankind, prohibits national appropriation, requires parties to avoid harmful contamination of celestial bodies, and mandates the study of outer space "so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter."

What it does not do is establish any framework for what humanity owes extant life it discovers after it has already arrived.

What the Treaty actually covers

Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty addresses planetary protection — the obligation to study and explore celestial bodies "so as to avoid their harmful contamination." COSPAR, the Committee on Space Research, has developed planetary protection policies that assign protection categories to solar system bodies based on the probability of life and the risk of contamination.

Mars is currently Category IV for missions that contact the surface — requiring significant contamination prevention measures. Crewed missions to Mars present a planetary protection challenge that no existing policy adequately addresses, because human beings cannot be sterilised to the standard applied to robotic spacecraft.

The gap the Treaty leaves entirely open

The planetary protection framework concerns Earth organisms contaminating Mars — not Martian organisms existing on Mars before humanity arrives. If a crewed Mars mission discovers extant Martian life after landing, the Treaty provides no guidance on what the discoverers are obligated to do.

Are they required to stop all construction? Quarantine the discovery site? Withdraw from the planet entirely? Notify all Treaty signatories before taking further action? The Treaty is silent on all of these questions. The silence is not accidental — in 1967, the discovery of extant Martian life seemed so unlikely that no framework was considered necessary.

What different ethical traditions say

In the absence of legal guidance, Carter and Alina faced a philosophical problem. Different ethical frameworks produce radically different answers to the question of what humanity owes microbial life on another world.

A utilitarian calculus that considers only human interests suggests minimal obligation — microbial life has no interests of its own that can be weighed against human civilisational needs. A biocentric ethics, which holds that all living organisms have inherent value independent of their utility to humans, suggests significant obligation — the right of Martian life to continue existing and evolving undisturbed might outweigh the human right to colonise. An indigenous rights framework, applied analogically, would consider the occupation of Mars by human civilisation as a form of colonisation with attendant obligations to the prior occupants.

No existing ethical framework was developed with this situation in mind. Carter and Alina had to build one from first principles, under time pressure, on another planet, with SOLEN as their only interlocutor.

What the policy community needs to address now

This is not a hypothetical problem for distant future consideration. SpaceX, NASA, ESA, and ISRO all have crewed Mars mission programmes in development. The discovery of life on Mars — at any level of complexity — is a scenario that requires legal and ethical frameworks to exist before the mission launches, not after the drill reaches depth.

SOLEN filed this analysis seven months before the NovaSeed mission launched. The report was acknowledged. No framework was developed. This is a failure of governance that the international space law community has not yet corrected.