DrColdReality

You can't really guarantee anything

Exactly, and therein lies the major problem.

While I am not one to discourage research, this sounds like a seriously risky thing to do. The chances of contaminating a priceless pristine environment are high. Once Mars has been contaminated by organisms from Earth, it's pretty much game over for the question of studying native Martian life, if any exists.

Just for starters, we have the fact that about 60% of missions to Mars fail in some way. It doesn't matter HOW well-sealed your experiment is if it winds up as debris scattered across miles of the surface.

Next, to put it bluntly, shit happens. Even with a well-designed experiment, gaskets fail, software has bugs, mechanical parts fail.

I have a better idea: do this on Earth. We know the composition of the Martian atmosphere, and we know the qualities of the local light and climate. Unless you are proposing to do this in Martian soil--in which case, you need to explain how you're dealing with the toxic levels of perchlorate--there is absolutely NO reason to do this experiment on Mars, aside from the gee-whiz factor.

We're not Mars One or acting on their behalf in any way.

Yet you prominently display their name on your site. You are aware that Mars One is almost certainly a scam, yes?

OK, "scam" might be a harsh word here. The entire "enterprise" consists of precisely three people who quite obviously don't have a CLUE about the enormous technical problems that would have to be solved before you could put a human habitat on Mars. Their claim that they intend to do it in a little over 10 years is beyond silly.

Once again: I am all about science, and far be it from me to quash scientific curiosity. But the consequences of a failure--which is actually quite likely--are STAGGERING. For this thing to crash on landing and spread Earth organisms on Mars might well qualify as one of the worst possible blows to science we could ever encounter.

I'm a lot less worried about the contamination a human habitat would cause, because I know there's approximately zero chance of that happening in the next 50 years, at least.

We might have already contaminated Mars.

Although project engineers went to considerable lengths to sterilize our early probes like Viking--insofar as you CAN fully sterilize a complex machine without reducing it to a pile of ash--they realized that not only could the sterilization procedure not be absolutely, positively, 100% certain, but recontamination could also happen. Thus, they trusted that the months of exposure to hard radiation and vacuum en route would kill off any stragglers.

But that was BEFORE we knew about extremophiles, organisms that thrive in environments we previously believed were 100% fatal to all life. So today, they take even more care in scrubbing our grubby fingerprints off of Mars-bound probes.

But deliberately sending Earth organisms to Mars is a huge risk, and not IMO worth the scientific gain (particularly since the experiment could be conducted on Earth). Fortunately for the greater good of science, if these folks are counting on hitching a ride on a Mars One craft, it simply isn't gonna happen.

Landing humans on Mars is a slam-dunk for contamination: people are walking contamination machines, and it simply isn't possible to prevent it once we plant a muddy boot print there.

submarine captains absolutely did have a formal directive to question a launch order,

OK, so you MUST have seen the film Crimson Tide, yes? How plausible were the film's depictions of the Captain's and XO's actions regarding the second incomplete EAM? Would that be something that would trigger a real sub captain to question the order?

It's what I do. I'm big laughs at parties...

Did a plane actually hit the Pentagon?

Yes:

--There were witnesses who saw it fly right over their heads.
--There are a couple of brief video images of the plane about to hit the building.
--Lots of airplane parts were found at the scene, many of them with traceable serial numbers.

The damage looks completely different.

If you were expecting a plane-shaped hole, that's cartoons you're thinking of, that typically doesn't happen in real life.

The damage at the pentagon does not look the same as the WTC’s.

That's because they were two VERY different buildings. The Pentagon was built as a standard steel-frame building, which (simplified) means that the strongest parts of it were towards the outsides. Furthermore, parts of the Pentagon had been reinforced specifically to withstand a missile attack.

The WTC towers were too tall to be built as standard steel-frame. Instead, most of the load in the buildings was attached to two huge-ass steel columns near the center. The outside walls of the WTC were really about as sturdy as tissue paper, and in one of them, you actually CAN see a nearly plane-shaped hole.

When the plane hit the Pentagon, the plane punched entirely through the outer ring of the building, effectively liquefying in the process, then punched a hole partway into the next ring. It hit parts of the reinforced parts, and it hit normal parts as well. The roof of the outer ring did not collapse right away because it was reinforced. The fire later made it collapse.