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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.
The Matrix was right. Humans are a virus.
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 !?!
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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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.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
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.
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.
Not chimps? How about Gorillas? Dolphins? Whales? Heck, it's possible a dog is as smart as Afarensis. I think your definition of "intelligence" may not be very smart.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Or just drop empty Coca-Cola bottles ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So then why aren't Koalas driving us to extinction? After all they have twice as many thumbs...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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!
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.
They're pacifists, man... from all the eucalyptus leaves.
Far out!
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
.. 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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
> 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.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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If local life already exists there is almost no chance that life imported from Earth would be better adapted to local conditions. Worrying about it is probably silly. It might not even have the same chirality, and it would certainly be expecting a different radiation budget from its sun. Also the proportion of gases in the atmosphere would just about certainly be different. (Gravity probably doesn't matter, but air pressure might.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Keep in mind that by sending earth microbes we're giving life there a 3.8 billion year head start.
No we aren't. There is chemical evidence that life existed as soon as 300 million years of planet formation (i.e. about as soon as compatible conditions existed). We have actual fossils of life that formed 950 million years after planet formation.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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
It's important to not ruin potentially important sources of research. We know quite a bit about our own kind of life, be we know nothing about other kinds of life.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Once we get sophisticated enough probes etc. we'll probably soon find that life is literally everywhere in the universe. From what's been found already on earth it's clear that microbes can live almost everywhere. And when you get things like tardigrades and the shrimp who live in hydrothermal vents etc. it's clear that multicellular life seems to find a niche almost everywhere.
Personally I think the whole multiverse is teeming with life. It just seems to be a natural part of things There are probably beetles everywhere !
Intelligence on the other hand is severely lacking :)
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Therefore we should expect every planet that can possibly support life to already have it.
Then where's the life elsewhere in the Solar System. There's several places where we could plant Earth life right now. And it'd be pretty obvious after a while that we did so.
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.
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).
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
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.
I suspect it's there (especially, Europa) but we just haven't run across it yet. Other than Mars, we haven't been looking very hard.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
Here is a show you might want to watch, then let's discuss that topic afterwards.
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