What If We Sent Animals To Alien Planets? | Unveiled

What If We Sent Animals to Alien Planets?

Humans have worked alongside animals for thousands of years. Our ancestors domesticated wolves, creating canine companions; tamed horses for use in transportation; and more recently, used canaries in coal mines to detect dangerous gases. But when we finally take to the stars and start to visit other planets, we’ll be doing so alone – unless we decide we can’t live without man’s best friends.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if we sent animals to alien planets?

We’ve actually already sent a number of animals into space, beginning with experiments in the late 1940s that studied the effects of spaceflight. In 1947 the US launched fruit flies into space using a V-2 rocket; the flies returned alive in a capsule that parachuted back down to Earth. Many other animal astronauts were not so fortunate. The following year a rhesus macaque named Albert was sent up, but suffocated en route; in 1949 his successor Albert II survived the journey, but not the crash when his capsule’s parachute failed. It wasn’t until 1959 that NASA succeeded in bringing space-faring monkeys back alive.

The first animal to actually orbit the Earth was Laika, a street dog chosen by scientists in the USSR to be Sputnik 2’s only passenger in 1957. Though Sputnik 2 was technically a successful mission, Laika sadly died when the capsule malfunctioned. Other early pioneers into space included mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, frogs, goldfish, and various species of primates, including squirrel monkeys and chimpanzees.

Fortunately, times have changed, and you can’t just fire a dog off into space anymore. However, in the twenty-first century, we have sent up a number of insects, fish, and mice, among other species. In fact, the ISS actually has a fish tank called the Aquatic Habitat, built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. These experiments aim to reveal the effects of microgravity and spaceflight on living organisms.

Despite our successes in sending animals into space however, we’ve yet to send any living being to another planet. In 2011 there was an attempt to send tardigrades to Mars, but the spacecraft fell back to Earth. For researchers, the main goal of such experiments would be the same as what motivated the US and USSR to send animals into space in the early days of spaceflight: to study the effects and ensure human safety. However, any such studies would be fraught with obvious ethical issues, especially when it came to missions that were one-way or didn’t involve human caretakers. It’s doubtful that a plan to send off another Albert or Laika to Mars will ever be approved, due to the undeniable cruelty. It’s more feasible that as successive human explorers land on Mars, they’ll bring along insects, fish, or even mice – although here too, many would object on ethical grounds.

There are also other circumstances in which we might end up bringing animals to other planets. Billions of people keep pets worldwide, and this desire for animal companionship definitely wouldn’t stop because we happened to be on Mars. So, it’s easy to imagine that someday, once human outposts on Mars and beyond are established, we might make the leap of sending animals out there, too.

We might also want to send livestock to alien worlds so that we could produce a wider variety of food and other products locally. Meat alternatives are all well and good for early astronauts, but considering that the vast majority of people do eat meat, they wouldn’t be quick to pass up the opportunity to bring meat and dairy to other planets.

Taking animals to another planet would be difficult though, especially en masse. Even if the final destination were hospitable, thanks to terraforming or artificial environments for example, the animals would still have to spend months or years on a spacecraft to get there. They would need enclosures and areas to move around in, as well as food and water and people to take care of them. That would take up a lot of space and, most importantly, weight.

Then there’s the issue of microgravity. Unless the ships had artificial gravity, certain animals would need to be secured in place; you couldn’t just have cows floating about in their enclosures. But on especially long voyages, animals would also need some form of exercise to stay healthy, necessitating specialized equipment. Microgravity becomes even more of a problem when you consider animal waste, with animals unable to use the methods that astronauts do when they go to the bathroom. Astronauts do try to recycle as much as possible, but they can’t yet recycle everything and there are still questions around how to best use or dispose of feces.

All these tasks would be made somewhat easier if we could invent some sort of stasis system for protracted journeys, like cryo-sleep in science fiction. With funding from NASA, Atlanta-based SpaceWorks Enterprises is looking into the creation of a viable stasis chamber, but whether they’ll succeed is an entirely different question. Their idea is to build a “torpor inducing transfer habitat” that will “place crew and passengers in a prolonged hypothermic state”. Perhaps similar technology could be used on animals, although presumably different equipment, monitoring systems, and temperatures would be required for different species - driving up research and manufacturing expenses.

Even if stasis does become an option though, all these problems - space, weight, waste, and efficient recycling - might make the idea of transporting livestock more expensive than it’s worth.

But suppose that money is no object, and that we are able to transport animals to an alien planet. If we bring animals to an exoplanet that’s hospitable and harbours alien life, things might quickly get out of hand. A small island in Japan called Aoshima was overrun with cats after humans brought them across to deal with a rodent problem. Now nicknamed “Cat Island”, there are hundreds of cats running loose. Domestic cats that are allowed outside can be harmful to native wildlife here on Earth, so they could do untold damage to an alien ecosystem.

In fact, invasive species, in general, are immensely damaging. Florida has a major problem with pets like iguanas and Burmese pythons being released into the wild when their owners get tired of them. An alien planet could feasibly get overrun by animals just like Cat Island. Culling them might be seen as even more unethical than taking them to space in the first place.

Even if the animal population is kept in check, we’d still have the problem of how to dispose of their remains. NASA is still looking into how best to deal with the possibility of a human crew member perishing during a long voyage. Of course, for animals, we might be content with space burials - although the UN actually makes it illegal to litter in space. This might mean we’d have to cremate animals, or freeze them and reduce them to powder, in order to store the remains aboard. The problem could get even more complicated once on an alien planet. Supposing that we were studying the planet’s astrobiology, and living in biodomes, we might not want to bury a body outside, where it would introduce Earth microbes into the soil, contamining it.

But what if taking animals to another planet was the entire goal – to set up a planet exclusively for farming? On Earth, industrial agriculture is one of the biggest causes of climate change. Forests are leveled to provide grazing space for cattle, and livestock emit a significant amount of methane. Moving the production of animal products like meat and dairy away from Earth could give us the best of both worlds; we’d retain them as food sources and Earth’s environment could recover.

But it’s expensive to farm animals, particularly cows and pigs, and these costs would skyrocket if you had to transport food and water from Earth to a different planet. Even if we do one day master terraforming so that animals can roam freely on another planet, it would still be a costly endeavor. An even worse plan would be to send them to an Earth-like exoplanet, because any such exoplanet would be so far away that it would make building a planet-wide farm on it completely ridiculous. Once we’re at the point where we can terraform whole worlds, build human colonies, and travel between stars, we’ll probably also have mastered plant-based and synthetic meats, making “Cow Planet” pointless.

Though taking the pets we enjoy on Earth to another planet might seem like a good idea, making the isolation of deep space travel more bearable, even bringing a small number of animals to another world would be expensive, difficult, and perhaps even dangerous. And that’s what would happen if we sent animals to alien planets.