Quarantines can help a society protect itself from dangerous infections.
The word comes from the French, for the 40 days of isolation once faced by new arrivals who may have been infected. Quarantining an entire planet against potentially harmful extraterrestrial diseases becomes more difficult. The launch of Stardust to retrieve a milligram of dust from the Wild-2 comet is the first human attempt to bring back extraterrestrial samples in almost three decades. NASA would like to bring back samples from Mars in less than 10 years. Other comet missions are also on tap, and the Russians dream of retrieving samples from the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos.