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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.
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 !?!
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.
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.
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.
Because one of the fundamental questions of biology / philosophy and science fiction (have I left anybody else out?) is whether or not we're unique little snowflakes or if life just happens any time there is enough light, heat and garbage to get things going. Until we answer that we should be very careful to keep our ugly little biosphere to ourselves.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
.. 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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> Because one of the fundamental questions of biology / philosophy and science fiction (have I left anybody else out?) is whether or not we're unique little snowflakes
That has nothing to do with the question asked. It PRESUPPOSED that life is already there, if you bother to re-read it.
The question is about the existence of our role in guiding (our or other species) evolution, which is silly and borderline religious.
Earth life cannot know or act on what the optimal configuration for life is going to be, so we have no choice but to continue and expanding is part of our known successful strategy for our form of life.
Might as well say "stop having babies now" because it might make us more difficult for some other (morally) superior form of life to convert or remove humanity.
Yes, you might lose some advantage that studying and conquering an alien ecosystem might afford, but so what? That act has a different cost that's practically, much much higher. All of the non-apocalyptic concerns (like spinning a planet out of it's orbit) raised by destroying other ecosystems on other worlds are fundamentally counterproductive for our form of life...which I keep saying because any interplanetary colonization will necessitate or result in variation on our species, but will also include a nontrivial biome. This includes worlds in our solar system, which are not more or less ours than any other stellar body.
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Koalas are stupid. Really, really stupid. Even though they don't have a particularly small head relative to their body size, they have a small brain (compared to other marsupials) relative to body size. On top of that, the two halves of the brain aren't connected. Researchers have noted that they're so unintelligent that if you try to feed them eucalyptus leaves (their primary diet) on a platter, they won't eat them because they don't understand it as food if they don't pick it from a tree.
Considering Australia is full of all kinds of deadly shit, it's somewhat amazing that the Koala isn't extinct itself. The only reason that I can think that they're still around is that their food source is so nutritionally worthless they don't have any real competition for food. Otherwise it's the retarded cousin of marsupial family (or order or class or wherever that falls into place in the taxonomy).
Koalas have no reason to have much brain power.
Koalas aren't good eating - they're toxic because they're full of eucalyptus oil. So they don't need to avoid predators. They eat one thing, so all they need the brains for is to find the thing and eat it.
Having a large, metabolically active brain would be a bad thing for a koala because the food they eat is so low on nutrition they'd be wasting energy running it.
There's selective pressure *away* from having brain power.