[creer]

Great article on the Apollo mission return "quarantine". One lesson is that it got not much priority (the vehicle itself released in air and ocean water), and not much effort: lots of things in the lab were not tested or designed sufficiently (broken glove / gloveboxes, fire procedures involving breaching containment...) Another lesson is that this was apparently not tested or wargamed anywhere enough. No test run? A third is that of course it didn't go perfect, with the two first points as a starting point, and the fact that it was the first run. In hindsight, of course it would fail.

That argues for at least taking the idea of containment (for AI or Mars samples) more seriously. But it also argues that it will (of course) not be taken seriously enough. Plus amateurs not taking things seriously either. So, taking it even more seriously because of this prior experience.

Science is used to "fair warnings" (screwdriver criticality experiments, Marie Curie, now lunar samples, but yes also smallpox ... plenty of stories) - but all of these were minor: a few persons died, the rest learned. And the risk for a sufficient AI is not in the same scale. For that one, we don't have much experience. Comparable might be high containment pathogen labs maybe? - with plenty of problems themselves; and the difficulty of cleaning computers after an intrusion (proper procedure being a clean re-install - not possible for an AI leak.)