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Should We Seed Life On Alien Worlds? (sciencemag.org)
Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes an article from Science magazine: Astronomers have detected more than 3000 planets beyond our solar system, and just a couple of weeks ago they discovered an Earth-like planet in the solar system next door. Most -- if not all -- of these worlds are unlikely to harbor life, but what if we put it there?
Science chatted with theoretical physicist Claudius Gros about his proposed Genesis Project, which would send artificially intelligent probes to lifeless worlds to seed them with microbes. Over millions of years, they might evolve into multicellular organisms, and, perhaps eventually, plants and animals. In the interview, Gros talks artificial intelligence, searching for habitable planets, and what kind of organisms he'd like to see evolve.
"The robots will have to decide if a certain planet should receive microbes and the chance to evolve life," the physicist explains -- adding that it's very important to avoid introducing new microbes on planets where life already exists.
Science chatted with theoretical physicist Claudius Gros about his proposed Genesis Project, which would send artificially intelligent probes to lifeless worlds to seed them with microbes. Over millions of years, they might evolve into multicellular organisms, and, perhaps eventually, plants and animals. In the interview, Gros talks artificial intelligence, searching for habitable planets, and what kind of organisms he'd like to see evolve.
"The robots will have to decide if a certain planet should receive microbes and the chance to evolve life," the physicist explains -- adding that it's very important to avoid introducing new microbes on planets where life already exists.
Humans.
Why is it important to NOT seed worlds where life is starting? Is there actually a moral code the universe follows? What's the difference of some random chunk rock that got sheered off a planet with viable DNA or microbes on it chance impacting on a world or our probe? Life just has the impetus to move forward, there's no morality involved with it. Water finds it's own level, does it choose to go around a village? Does electricity make a conscious choice to NOT zap a herd of cows while coming down from a cloud? Does Ebola only kill the bad people? Imposing church influence views on a science program is the wrong thing to do here.
The Matrix was right. Humans are a virus.
Otherwise, yes we should go ahead and seed everything we can find.
Note that we should use a pretty generous definition of "intelligence" for that caveat. I'm not sure I'd count a chimp, but would definitely count Australopithecus Africanus, and maybe Afarensis.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
At least I think so :p
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
1) Send microbes and viruses, algae across interstellar space in probe 2) Probe arrives .. primative aliens witness the strange falling star ... probe soft lands and delivers payload.
3) Alien genetics without any ability to compete against earth organisms overwhealmed in short order (High CO2 environment ecology)
4) Alien life wiped off the planet and human freindly Oxygen producing algae conquer alien ecology.
5) ... profit !?!
Won't we just create space (pun intended) for Church of Scientology? If and whenever Intelligent life evolves?
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I see no issue with this whatsoever. Also, I for one welcome our giant insect overlords.
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People who couldn't even seed life into the opposite sex on this planet are somehow very preoccupied with planets we'll never reach...
Star Trek as well as many other sci-fi series covered this topic from a variety of angles. The take-away message is that until we can say with absolute certainty what 'life' entails - even if it's outside our own narrow definition - we stand to only destroy life, not create it.
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I would think of this as being pre-colonization. The probes would analyze the planets in the target star system, determine if any are both suitable for life and lifeless, and then determine the fastest way to bring those planets up to human standards.
I don't think we're talking millions of years here. Depending on the state of the planet when found, it would be hundreds to thousands of years.
The probe could even include more advanced species as frozen embryos with artificial gestation pods to introduce all sorts of species when the conditions are right. That could even include humans.
The question for me is not if we should do this, but when we should do this. What technologies should we wait for before building and launching the probes? How urgently do we need to get an off-system presence to ensure the survival of humanity?
Can we leave an instruction book - stone tablets perhaps - explaining we are not gods, and that they should adopt a rational moral code that does not require our approval, or approbation.
Background: Proteins are made by chaining tlgether amino acids drawn from a specific set, and there is a coding scheme that selects a specific amino acid for each DNA nucleotide triplet.
According to my biology book, the amino acids that make up life on this planet are largely random. There are a couple that are so close in form and function that they can substitute for one another with little difference, there are other compounds which might have useful forms which are not used as amino acids, and there are gaps and duplication in the coding scheme.
Once the amino acid and coding scheme evolved, it became a survival characteristic to use that same scheme, simply because you could eat the other living matter on the planet. As a result, virtually everything on the planet uses the same amino acid/coding scheme.
On another planet, life might evolve with a different set of amino acids (possibly even mostly the same as ours, but with one or two differences) and a different coding scheme. While AAA might be Lysine on Earth, it might code for something else on a distant planet.
This means that if we find life on another planet, it probably wouldn't be edible by humans. It's highly likely that none of the vegetation could be farmed or eaten, and any animal life would probably be poisonous. (But the good news: alien pathogens wouldn't be able to infect us, so there's little chance of bringing "space herpes" back to Earth.)
If we seeded the distant planet with life from Earth, it's likely that the same amino-acid/coding scheme would proliferate and remain unchanged. If and when we choose to go there, the flora and fauna would be available to us as a resource.
We would of course need to sort out the philosophical implications of doing this. If we could get to another planet, we'd probably also have the technology to make our own food as needed, and it would seem wrong to destroy a planet harbouring animal life for our own gain. Maybe if it only had plant life, lichens or moss, say.)
In ancient Rome the zeitgeist of the times would be "yeah! let's do it".
I don't know what the prevailing opinion would be 100 years in the future.
Consider the following:
1. Are we really so arrogant as to think that even if we managed to send a human being to an exoplanet capable of sustaining life, that we'd be able to determine with 100% accuracy whether it's lifeless or not? Rhetorical question, the answer is no, and we sure as hell can't send a so-called 'AI' (which we really don't have anyway) that could do any better than a human being could anyway.
2. The lifeless-or-not question aside, how can we be sure that this planet we send it to isn't real estate claimed by some other spacefaring race? Another rhetorical question, because again we can't. We might be invading someone else's property with our unwanted microbes.
3. Even the previous rhetorical questions are rhetorical; it would take hundreds and hundreds of years for any probe to reach any exoplanet we currently know of, and it would take an incredible amount of time after that to receive any sort of data back from the probe indicating it's arrived and seen and done anything there. At the rate we're going, in a few hundred years no one might even be here to receive any such signal, let alone remember how to receive it; at the rate we're going we might be living in a post-apocalyptic world like in Mad Max, sans Charlize Theron of course.
4. The best thing we should do, if we're going to do anything like this at all, is to just send a probe to an exoplanet to observe and report, just like the other probes we've been sending out for decades into our own planetary system. The fact of the matter is, the observations we've made of exoplanets thus far from light-years away are not going to be as accurate or detailed as close-up observations from a probe. Besides, if there are other civilizations out there and perhaps they own one of the planets we're planning on visiting, aren't they more likely to look kindly on it (and us) if it turns out the device we send is obviously there only to look and listen, not drop off something potentially offensive or destructive? If there are in fact other civilizations out there, we can't know how they'd regard some alien spacecraft entering their space with, upon examining it, the intent to drop off some sort of biologicals. They might consider it an attack, and rightly so. Better to not interfere. Besides, we have a lot to learn about our Galaxy and Universe yet, we've hardly even begun to scratch the surface. We've also go a long ways to go before we'd be able to build any craft that would survive such a journey anyway, and in fact having lots of time to debate the subject would also be a good thing, while other space-related technologies are being developed, like the new engine that doesn't require any reaction mass; if it in fact works as advertised, and can be scaled up and refined, then it would be perfectly suited for such a long journey, and in fact would shorten the transit time considerably.
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We're allmost fucked up this planet, one is more than enough!
Cap't Kirk attempted to do this on practically every planet.
If by some weird chance life is rare and Earth is the only living planet on a reasonable distance, then we really have to seed them. That would act as a failsafe is life on our planet gets destroyed.
Why not fully-developed plant and/or animal life, if the world can support them!
Long term, we will have to find a way to survive in other places. Eventually, something will happen to Earth. We've already been hit by monster meteors that killed 90% of life on earth. There's surely another one out there that could go farther. Eventually, we'll need to find other places to live, if we want to survive.
We still think people should starve if they can't compete 24/7 with AI algorithms in China
Only libertardians seem to think that. (They apparently didn't consider that the outputs would eventually overflow the warehouses.)
Ezekiel 23:20
We've got to get there before E.T. takes it over and turns it into a telemarketing center.
Yeah, so we can have a bunch of acidic hypermobile fanged superworms crawling about eating people's faces off and exploding out of their bellies. Absolutely no reason to think this through before implementation. Nope. It's a great idea. Make for a good film.
Sure, why not. After all, “We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks.”
Here on earth, it's so important to preserve our natural environment because we're causing damage to our ecosystem that, if not checked, will become irreversible and deadly. If you were the ONLY human being in the Amazon rain forest, it wouldn't be an environmental problem for you to clear-cut an acre of land to grow some crops. But when you're one of millions who are doing the same thing, you are now causing serious damage to the planet.
In our universe, there are so, so many potentially inhabitable planets. There is room to experiment, even if it turns out badly on some of the planets, it's OK, there are so many more. We're still the lone farmer in the Amazon rain forest.
we may not have any microbes that are at all like the earliest life forms that colonized earth. what we have now are forms which may not thrive in initial pre-biotic conditions. best guess: try some stromatolite producing bacteria, esp. any which appear to also be in the ancient fossil record as producing similar structures.
Considering we don't even have the technology to get to worlds outside the solar system yet, we'll have plenty of time to debate the ethics of seeding them....
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Should We Seed Life On Alien Worlds?
I see nothing wrong with seeding life on sterile planets. Planets which already have life should be off limits. There is something to be said in favour of Star Trek's prime directive although, knowing humans, we'll probably adopt a strategy that will resemble a blend of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition and Klingon foreign policy.
Can we put T-Rump on an purposefully UN-intelligent space probe, and shoot him off to a random destination?
Tried this once and ended up seeding a planet of psychotic apes. They don't even bother to visit on snarplaars day!
Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. The universe is a very hostile place, we could be wiped out in the blink of an eye and right now we have all our eggs in one basket.
Actually I disagree. At the moment seeding remote worlds would involve firing off a probe blindly containing what, for the planet involved, could be a lethal virus which would wipe out life there. If there were intelligent life this would be effectively declaring war and if there is no intelligent life we have just wiped out what might have been our first chance to study extra-terrestrial life.
...and for what? The possibility to seed a planet so that in a few billion years time (on Earth it took 3 billion years before the first microbes evolved into multi-cellular lifeforms and 100's million for those lifeforms to populate the land) we might have a habitable planet which is too far away to reach with current technology? So on the one hand you are expecting us to develop the technology to be able to travel there while at the same time not developing any technology which can terra-form a planet in less than a few hundred million years at best?
The time to do this is when we develop the technology to travel there. Doing it beforehand is lots of risk with no reward.
There is no evidence that there is a large number of habitable but sterile planets. In fact, most scientists would likely find that notion rather surprising. Life developed so rapidly on earth after conditions were suitable that the same is likely true elsewhere. That is, if we don't find life on other planets, it's likely because they are too dry, too hot, or too cold. Any planet with lots of liquid water probably already has life.
Don't these 'scientists' read science fiction? Don't they know history? Aren't they aware that European incursions into the New World killed millions with disease?
So we send microbes to presumably uninhabited planets. Fine, except for those that *are* inhabited. How will those foreign microbes effect the existing life forms? We have messed up enough planets already, let's stop here.
...omphaloskepsis often...
By the time we've mastered interstellar travel I expect we got synthetic biology solved so all we need are the chemicals to construct humans on site and how to build a sustainable colony from Mars. The microbes would start a terraforming process, meanwhile the outpost can start with a small greenhouse that slowly processes part of the native atmosphere then grow into larger and larger domes building up an earth-like habitat. In time we could expose the toughest plants to growing outside or in semi-shielded environments. It'll take a while but we could turn other planets into new earths, isn't that the master plan?
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i figure it will take a long time for any probe to get anywhere. We'll probably be able to easily intercept it with our warp drives by the time we figure out if it's a good idea or not. in the meantime, we will feel like a cool space faring species.
Keep in mind that by sending earth microbes we're giving life there a 3.8 billion year head start. How long is it going to take to have an intelligent species? Probably somewhere between "relatively soon" and "never" with the exact timing left to some genetic rolls of the dice. What if we choose other colonization targets later on? Will we sterilize the discarded planet (presumably difficult and costly) or let it continue evolving? What if a species optimizing for intelligence turns out to be much smarter than we are and covers technological ground in exponentially faster time? Do we want to setup potential competitors directly in our own small corner of the galaxy? Or what about the threat of simple microbes? It's unlikely that if we encounter extraterrestrial microbes that they will be adapted to our bodies in a way that they can infect us, but seems to me earth microbes would stand a much better chance of evolving potentially compatible pathogens.
There may be wisdom in spearheading our colonization efforts, but I think we ought to wait on having the technology to directly monitor and manage it. Trusting that whatever evolution spits out is going to be to our direct benefit seems like an unnecessary gamble.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Great idea. Given enough time and energy we will eventually make this happen. If physics limitations make it difficult to send living creatures, then send building blocks of life to evolve it on capable planets. Now imagine something like humans form after millions of years and we travel there in spacecraft to make contact and tell them about their creation and how they came to be. They likely wouldn't understand. They would put it in terms that they understand in their daily lives. They would build a religion around it. Maybe this already happened. Maybe our "creators" and "God" are the aliens that did this, and we humans and all life on earth are the result of an ancient manifestation of this very plan.
FTFA:
Over millions of years, they might evolve into multicellular organisms, and, perhaps eventually, plants and animals.
..... and eventually they will supply us with some fresh, warm, lemon-scented towels.
Because AI too are cheaper in China ?
I have little doubt that some types of bacteria survived the hostilities of space to land on Mars with at least some of the probes that we've sent there.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And we shouldnt be doing organ transplants either because Mary Shellys Frankenstein.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhB3FH9tJIo
Just say no.
"Most -- if not all -- of these worlds are unlikely to harbor life"
Based on what evidence exactly? We have a rudimentary amount of information on a grand total of one solar system, our own. While that is a limited dataset it does give one decent metric, the one planet that is habitable (liquid water, moderate temperatures, decent atmosphere, etc) is inhabited. So based on that limited data it is likely the other way around, if a planet can naturally support life it probably already does. When we finally get around to exploring the moons of Jupiter we might be able to add to that dataset, for example if Europa's subsurface ocean is a pretty decent environment and we don't find life then we can say the chances are 50/50. But we're a LONG way from saying that a world with the right environment for life is likely to be lifeless.
If there are other spacefaring civilizations, maybe they seeded life in the Solar System a couple billion years back?
This makes a lot of sense, gettting a planet ready to support Blue/Green Algae is a huge priority!
Yes. Any intelligent life owes the universe to help seed life around it. The universe is extremely lazy. It does everything as cheaply as possible.
The conditions for life, while very well understood, can easily be wiped out clean just by a natural disaster as well. It almost happened on our planet several times.
Natural disasters are "unfair" on life because even we don't realistically have a way to defend against the most severe ones.
Of course, the universe doesn't give 2 shits about fairness.
We should seed life anywhere we possibly can. Even send out trillions of probes in every direction with universal language plates to encode the information and DNA of most common family lines on our planet, if not as many as humanly possibly. We have a good deal of creatures catalogued now, but nowhere near all of them. (we literally only just found out Giraffes are 4 different sub-species rather than one species, crazy stuff)
Doesn't need to be super expensive. We could mass fabricate them in any generic fabrication facility.
Then have another plate that has a sign of progressively smaller and smaller information, which demonstrates how lenses work.
This way, they'll need to be advanced enough to actually understand that the information is encoded very densely.
They won't even really need to be advanced enough to be able to grow these lifeforms in a lab, just advanced enough to be able to read it and understand the vast variety of life on the planet. (and figure out if we have a similar system for encoding data in our genes, they might have something wildly different from our DNA / RNA world. We know several that can be stable and have similar energy requirements)
That way, even if we are one day long gone, there might be one chance that one of them could be found by some species a few billion years in the future from now.
We just need to be sure that we etch the information in to something that will last a long ass time in space.
Not to mention withstand radiation passively. This, sadly, would increase the cost of it massively.
Realistically it would only be viable on this scale once we actually get mining in space and have literally spaceship fabrication facilities in space.
Just like in Star Trek and many other series, no point building ships on the ground, just do it in space, insanely cheaper cost.
Is there a chance we could wipe out other life?
Sure there is. But we still also be creating entirely new life in the process.
It is the sperm / period problem. They die out regularly, which are all potential for new life. But new ones take their place.
Whacking it out to some tranny porn is killing billions of potential lifeforms, but they'd still die off even if you never, so it matters not.
Fact is, trillions of potential lifeforms regularly die out. Life keeps on trucking.
As long as the birth:death ratio is stable, all's good.
If we only send simple life to other planets, it will allow for entirely new and crazy lifeforms to evolve.
Hell, we could even try sending artificial strands structured differently, like the various ones we've made in labs.
Even send those ones with a metal backbone to planets we can tell are in a metal-rich and energy-rich environment, see if they manage to evolve naturally. It works in a lab, so theoretically given the right planetary system it could work in nature. Many metal reactions don't require massively high temperatures to work with. Much higher than the temperatures we are used to though. Most of our biology has tended towards the 30-40 degrees celsius range. But we know for a fact that life can exist in insanely higher temperatures, and most likely started out in those conditions via undersea vents in the ocean.
So, yes. We should seed the SHIT out of the universe. Or at least our own galaxy.
Just be sure to not poison planets though. Might cause a war with a more advanced species that was nearly wiped out by our stupidity.
These things need to be built in the ultimate clean-room: space.
Remember how time runs asynchronously in gravity?
Well let's assume for a minute that maybe the "universe" was already seeded, and if we theoretically decided to go exploring, every planet we visit has exactly the same kind of life Earth has, discovering that "our" earth was also seeded.
It's not to make fun of the rubber-forehead aliens trope from Star Trek, but what if genuinely all life in the universe progressed along an identical path and only diverged faster or slower depending how massive the habitable planet is. A much more massive planet might have more area and more gravity, with much smaller lifeforms, but maybe they might look like something we have on earth, like rats. Imagine intelligent rats, not from NiMH :D.
On the other end of that scale, what if all the planets we visit are lifeless. What if we were originally from Mars? What if Earth was originally inhabited by bugs, fish, and dinosaurs/birds and we threw the asteroid at Earth to prevent life here from gaining sentience, but then Mars's climate collapsed due to something stupid so they evacuated to Earth anyway.
Like, we must be incredibly naive to think that we're the only life in the universe. What if life on other planets only consists of plants, and the plants have a different scale of time much like insects do with us. What if there are spaceships that are literately rocks by our analysis, and the lifeform's time scale is in the thousands-of-years.
There is so much we don't understand about how life evolved still, we don't even know how brains actually work, just how to give people trippy experiences.
Should be: Can We Actually Stop Ourselves From Seeding Life On Other Planets?
If we are going to seed other planets with DNA (for reasons of ego or whatever), we should do so relatively quickly before we ruin our own planet.
If anyone can prove that, and trace it back to whatever race is responsible, then we have something to discuss, otherwise it's just hearsay and speculation. I'm talking about, say, an alien, starfaring race, bringing back the remains of a probe we sent, and confronting us about it..
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All of the posts that I've read make this assumption that at some point we will develop the tech to "seed" these planets, send the probe and that will be that... I think that what is more likely is that we will send our probe off on its way, and a hundred years later we will have developed a faster propulsion/better technology and find ourselves going "ooops, that was a waste of resources" as we our most current mission past the mission that was on its way already. If we were to send "seedling probes" out to other systems right now, (and assuming that the human race doesn't go extinct in the meantime) it is pretty much a given that the tech to send true "explore, investigate and report" type AI will be developed and sent out, arriving at the new systems long before Johnny Appleseed ever gets there.
.. a virus on a galactic scale.
.. when it was first published in Science last week, and I was surprised they were devoting any space to it.
The physicist had no insights to offer, just opinions about far off fanciful speculations unconnected with any current real science. The same interview could have been given by most any SF fan, and many SF authors could have offered far more substance and insight.
Here is Gros's original paper which was the hook on which the interview hung. Not a terrible paper at that, providing some interesting summaries about the evolution of the Earth and about planetary stability. But the "Genesis mission" seeding stuff is just SF hand-waving, even in the full paper. And the whole notion is based on the very questionable premise that organism-ready planets are common that do not already have their own biology established ("The objective of the Genesis mission is after all to give life the chance to prosper in places where it has not yet a foothold..."). Life on Earth may have become established within 300 million years of its formation - i.e. about as soon as compatible conditions existed.
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No
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You've made an assumption that our species will be able to develop the technology prior to an ELE.
There's lots of risk, but it's risky to NOT do it, if you think our ecology should propogate.
Paradoxically, I think humanity is great, but our ecology is not with high-energy requirements and relatively short adaptation cycles leading to a lot of missed genetic advantages and junk encoding in the DNA.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Yea, let those slimemolds get off their lazy butts and earn their own way. At the very least we should charge them for the tickets.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Or moments after we sent out the probes, we could be hit by an asteroid and our civilization is set back 5000 years. And at least we can be satisfied that our cousins (the slimemold) are going to make it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
We'll be OK as long as Professor Gros doesn't use unstable protomatter in his Genesis Device.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
We'll all be space-rich from the pain and suffering space-lawsuit; because whoever created life is ultimately responsible for ALL pain and suffering ever.
Should we seed? Well they did it to us, so I see no reason why we shouldn't do it to others.
If there's life there, what are the chances that the microbes that we send there will be better at living on their world than the nativre stuff is? Sure, some of the native life might die out, like when an invasive slug or fish or plant drives out an indiginous one, but ALL life? No way. Grey squirrels may have driven out the red squirrels here in the UK, but they aren't threatening any other life. Most likely the Earth life will cause some damage, and then crash and die out, and the native life will be back to normal in a few hundred thousand years.
Stand down the Genesis Weapon!
Were I an advanced alien civilization, I would make sure our make sure the human species could ever leave this solar system.
We're nothing more than a giant sized petri dish to study what happens when you simply let evolution decide the outcome.
Knowing how fucked up our species is, I can't say that I would blame them either.
We can't control our population numbers now, every medical advancement we make is towards longer longevity. It may not be our children or our grandchildren that suffer from starvation, but the witch hunt for GMO'd food must stop.
Let's put aside the ethics/morals debate for a moment and consider the math.
To send a spacecraft, using our current technology, to the nearest star would take tens of thousands of years. There is no reasonable expectation that a spacecraft built using our current technology could survive that long, so we cannot simply do this yet. Realistically, we're at least centuries away from being able to do this. That gives us a lot of time to research these planets.
Yay! Rationality!
linquendum tondere
We are fine introducing life where it doesn't exist, but should avoid invading life that already exists. After all, we'd just end up screwing things up that way.
Evolution is an algorithm, it is information, it is logic made manifest. The same process happens no matter where you are in the universe, so the outcome is the same whether or not we give it a boost.
Discuss? No, we will have someone to blame :) Humans are not well made (don't need to prove that, I hope) so just think of the damage law suit coming to those intergalactic seeders...
Also, why did that shovel had to be bent left? [10 internet points if you point to the source of that one...]
.g
You've made an assumption that continuing Earth life (we're not even talking Human life here) has some kind of value for humans who will be dead millennia before a probe reaches a viable candidate.
The very idea screams narcissism to me. On a scale never before imagined by any dictator.
Humans are not well made...
That is such a ridiculous assertion without context that asking for proof is pointless. There is none.
I'm assuming uninhabited as the whole prime directive thing actually makes good sense. :-)
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Humans are not 'made' at all, we evolved, and we're still in the process of evolving. This holds true whether life on Earth was a spontaneous phenomenon or not. Also, creationists are disqualified from this entire conversation due to being in diametric opposition to the entire premise.
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We don't "own" any of these worlds so we have no right to do jack shit to them.
And if these worlds already have some kind of life, then we might jeopardize that life by dumping ours on top of it. We already know life on Earth comes in a Bazillion(TM) different forms, some of which look like your annoying cousin Larry, and some of which look like rocks. So we go off to some world that looks like it's all rock and seed it, and whoa, it turns out the rocks are a life form and we just wiped it out. Nice work humans. Assholes.
Sig for hire.
You said "seed."
Why would you want to create billions of living beings with nervous systems that are going to inevitably suffer, most of them terribly, in the battle for survival? This is beyond belief. Do the idiots who thought this up believe that there are billions of 'souls' which are floating around, desperately hoping to find a body to live in? WTF?
"Humans are not well made"... this depends on what the purpose of "the human species" would be.
What if the purpose of humans is to "intentionally or accidentally cause their own destruction" then we seem to be "perfect".
Just because because it would seen logical(evolutionarily speaking) that any species' goal would be to evolve into an improved species, or a "better version" of the current species.
Humans might just be the exception.
There is a difference between developing the technology and deploying the technology. Obviously no point in deploying the technology unless you are going to live there. There reason to replace existing primitive (never advanced) life is allergies. Their DNA will have adapted to surviving with each other and will likely prove quite toxic to us and our mutually adapted DNA.
A seed ship will likely be something that grows, algae, fungi and bacteria and distributes it over that planet and allowing it to grow and replace what was there (don't want it too advanced and lot of the toxins would be left in the environment and they are much harder to eradicate and replace.
Once you have started to alter the planetary environment, considering the life you are planting there has no real predators and would grow, really, really fast (a lot faster than most people would imagine), you start adding in predators to bring it back under control and other new species, all done in stages. Lets no go all silly, you target primitive worlds and simply replace that DNA pattern with a more suitable one, life for life. Advanced worlds would simply be too difficult.
The other thing of course when it comes to transport large numbers of colonists, if they can readily live aboard your space bound cities, why leave except for ground bound, risky, holidays. So as mankind further develops into a galactic species so the desire to reproduce and spread to more planets shrinks. Keep in mind how much it will cost to send people to other planets, a huge investment so no labourers, a huge waste of resource. Basically people will work part of the day as professionals and rather than pay to exercise, work the other part of the day in more physical activity, the investment cost for sending labourers into space is just way to high. Especially when you can readily get enough far smart and more adaptable people to volunteer and even do it for free (as long as they get some creature comforts). You are no likely to get any people at all onto other planets below an IQ of 125, just not worth the investment.
You can see how becoming a galactic species would trigger a new evolution in humanity not the earth bound ones of course, just those who make it too others worlds and their descendants, it is just the way of things.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Attempt no landing there.
> You've made an assumption that continuing Earth life (we're not even talking Human life here) has some kind of value for humans
My scenario included the end of human life prior to any result. The risk inversion is calculated in regard to our carbon-based life, as we know it in contrast to the OPs blanket assertion.
I,m not saying this is the Federation's project Genesis... -- but this is project Genesis.
I find it kind of amusing that we are so taken with ourselves as a species that we can't imagine that life is probably quite capable of accomplishing that already. And it may well explain how we (meaning all life on earth) got here in the first place. The amazing thing about life is not the organisms themselves but the attainment of the right conditions for it to flourish. Phages or a similar simple organism may simply be a long term transport for the chemical seeds of life. The "accidents" of meteors and other space material falling to earth may be the way these seeds get exchanged. And probably only the most simplistic forms of life are worth transporting due to the time/distance and the vastly different conditions for survival, so only base life needs seeding. Then the conditions present dictate the direction and velocity of the evolutionary process.
Yes. Let's pick the life forms that will have the highest probability to evolve into dragons. Several million years later, it will be a great tourist trap. ROI is a bit too far and risk is almost infinite, but i'm sure someone will do it anyway.
What are the comparative costs of shipping a couple of kilos of embryos and frozen eggs & sperm (from tens of thousands of donor, voluntary or not) compared to shipping a single human (80kg) plus their life support system ( a few dozens of tones, hydroponics, pumps, filters, etc).
No. you'd not ship colonists. You'd ship embryos and when you get to the destination set about converting your travel ship to an industrial base, and building artificial wombs and "nursery robots" to rear the colonists to maturity. (Incidentally, this gives the opportunity for thorough-going indoctrination.) Then you set on with building your new colony. Plenty of stored genetic variation in the liquid nitrogen, and in your artificial society you encourage people to think it is a sin to indulge in natural childbirth. Hell, you might even want to make heterosexuality an unspeakable sin, for better population control.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Likelihood of shipping children without parents no matter how small the children are, ZERO. If the people who are doing the thinking, the working and the paying for it, are not going, the wakeup to reality, no one will go.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You've made an assumption that our species will be able to develop the technology prior to an ELE.
Why is this at all relevant? An extinction level event kills off some fraction of species not all life on the planet (e.g. mammals survived the dinosaur ELE). Seeding another planet with microbes does nothing to save the human race nor does it even save our ecology since the plan is that these microbe will evolve to form their own, unique ecology....although of course we will have no idea whether they are successful or not.
If there's life there, what are the chances that the microbes that we send there will be better at living on their world than the nativre stuff is?
Nobody knows...and that is precisely the point! We would be flying completely blind. However we would be introducing microbes, not mammals, and our history there is far more lethal e.g. evolution of the bubonic plague which wiped out a huge fraction of the human population at the time, current concerns about various flu viruses and ebola etc.
It is effectively playing Russian roulette with another planet's ecosystem using a gun with an unknown number of chambers. If there were some serious benefit to be hand then perhaps it is worth all the unknowns but, as far as I can see, there are no benefits at least for ~a billion years or so and even after that time only if we have some means of getting there...at which point we can probably do a far better and faster job of terraforming the place.
Volunteers were not being looked for.
Anyone who did get shipped (if some form of reliable "cold sleep" could be developed, which is a very big if) would effectively be on a one-way ticket to never seeing anyone they know for the rest of their life. And precious little chance of any other contact either - a birthday message 20 or 30 years late, perhaps. Anyone who was shipped would be a convict of some sort, convicted of a crime that would attract a penalty of life exile without parole or visitors. In the event that you live in a barbarous country that still uses execution, you're legal system probably has not thought much about what level of crime that would be, since it would be far more expensive than killing them. (A "cruel and unusual punishment" too.) But some people would probably qualify - and I'd suspect political offenders (say - the survivors of the 2001-09-11 plot) would be the ones in the frame.
Which would mean that you'd need either a volunteer overseer of whose political loyalty you had mathematically zero doubt (that's another big ask of reality) or you'd need a sufficiently well programmed supervising computer. And surveillance, big style. Surveillance to make the nastiest denizens of modern TLAs drool with lust.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Could we just go there as humans? I need to get away from the rampant stupidity here on Earth!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
...when it's convenient for the corporation.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman