Should We Seed Life On Alien Worlds? (sciencemag.org) 231
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. (Score:2, Funny)
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Pretty sure the takeaway from that scene is that Agent Smith has no understanding of what a virus is, computer OR biological, or pretty much any form of life. Probably because anything outside the Matrix not part of the human stacks or baby farm is a desolate wasteland of broken machine parts utterly devoid of any form of life.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment
Not through its own accord. Only through predation does this happen. Otherwise they achieve "equilibrium" by reproducing out of control and then starving to death. see: Lotka–Vo [wikipedia.org]
Yes, with a caveat (Score:2)
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.
Huge Risk and Inconsistent Technology Assumptions (Score:5, Interesting)
The time to do this is when we develop the technology to travel there. Doing it beforehand is lots of risk with no reward.
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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.
Re:Huge Risk and Inconsistent Technology Assumptio (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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 bac
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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.
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Totally ignoring the ethical implications of wiping out a planetary biosphere, if the point is to spread life rather than prepare it for colonization, then wiping out the local life by introducing a hostile microbial "seed" would potentially set back the evolution of complex life by billions of years. Even if there's nothing more complex than worms to start with, how many hundreds of millions of years do you suppose it would take our bacteria to evolve to that complexity?
As long as we stay away from europa, we're good (Score:2)
At least I think so :p
Invaders from Earth !! (Score:4, Interesting)
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The probe would have to be able to analyze the planets in the target system to look for any signs of native life, and switch from seeding to analysis.
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If the planet is lifeless, then we need to seed it with microbes to prepare it for the larger life forms. You'll probably need plankton in the oceans before they can sustain fish. It might only take a century to have thriving oceans, but it could be much longer depending on how much the chemistry of the water and atmosphere has to be adjusted by the microbes first.
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The freight bill for plants and animals is a lot higher than for microbes.
Re:Invaders from Earth !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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For the same reason midgets assume people are taller than them?
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If they're spacefaring, they're further along technological development than us, which grants them better communications and computers, which make them effectively smarter. Which, of course, helps them design still better comunications and computers. Universe seems to like exponential growth.
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If there are in fact other spacefaring civilizations out there in our galaxy, what would they think of us willy-nilly tossing our biologicals at random planets? Would they think we're smart and forward-thinking, or would they look at it as arrogant, self-centered, thoughtless, or hostile? Here on Earth (well, at least here in the U.S.) we expect Environment Impact studies done before real estate is developed, because we've learned that not doing so may cause us to do more harm than good. Why shouldn't we adopt the same policy with regard to exoplanets? Observe-and-report first, then consider carefully whether we do anything to 'develop' anything.
This is basically the same thing, it's just making the decision beforehand based on a set of conditions and having a computer make the final call according to those instructions. You could radio back for instructions, but that means an absolute minimum of another 8.6 years before you can begin the terraforming/seeding operation.
Any other rational civilization will look at it and say "these humans didn't know what they are doing, now let's go tell them how interplantary law works."
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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.
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Alternative storyline. 1) Earth probe lands on alien world and native life forms watch it land. 2) native life forms eagerly eat the "stuff" that comes out of it. 3) Native lifeforms get slight upset stomach and produce a few piles of slightly runny droppings. 4) Microbes in droppings merge with local microbes and evolve into some new micro organisms that find a nice niche within alien eco system. 5) Same as it ever was...
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Someone's never heard of cane toads. Or fire ants. Or rabbits. Or kudzu. Or the smallpox virus.
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Those were all imported into an environment that was prepared for them to flourish. (You left out various other species that were transported to places prepared for them to thrive.)
But you're talking about moving microbes to a place that has a different chemical composition, different air pressure, different day length, different tides, different.... If there's any competition then it should be at a distinct disadvantage, and would probably be food.
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The microbes that lead to the oxygen catastrophe were already adapted to the local environment.
Scientology? (Score:2)
Sure (Score:2)
Science-fiction already covered this (Score:3)
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You must have forgotten about the TNG episodes where it was revealed that all sentient species were actually artificially seeded by an advanced parent race. Of course, even that one didn't end quite as nicely as the parent race had envisioned, so maybe you've got a point.
My guess is that humanity won't have a lot of interest in artificially seeding life unless it's with the express purpose of terraforming planets for later habitation by humanity, and we're not going to want to wait a billion years for evol
Pre-Colonization Probes (Score:2)
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 al
Instruction Book (Score:2)
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.
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Nothing at all led to what we have now - clearly not the optimal solution.
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Nothing at all led to what we have now - clearly not the optimal solution.
And you have evidence for this? I'll note that such guidance on Earth would be both dependency forming and likely to result in reactionary behavior. Hands off means we have to learn how to deal with our world not merely ape what we are told. Further, by openly supporting a particular choice, you create another political faction and incentive for others to oppose the choice.
Just look at modern religion. There's a bunch of people who, if they became convinced that their religion was fake, would go off the
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It's being told rather than having to learn by yourself which allowed humans to transcend mere instinct and develope culture. Indeed, that's what culture is - a stream of acquired knowledge being passed down to the next generation.
A budding civilization might want to jihad your ass, but how are they're going to do th
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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 [wikipedia.org] ...
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"Hey look, it says here right off that we shouldn't worship them as gods, and that we shouldn't call them gods. But since this was clearly written by the gods, it must be a translation problem. Surely it means we shouldn't worship any other gods, and that we shouldn't call them gods without reason. Okay guys, first rule:
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Otherwise it makes about as much sense as pointing to a tree and saying, 'See that delicious fruit? Don't eat that.'
The forbidden fruit was a test of subservience. Don't eat the stuff that is good for you. Just to prove that people would follow authority figures. And since gods and religions are constructs of men, it was just a lesson to be subservient to the high priests. The metaphor of the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" was just an additional lesson that the people were expected to delegate issues of morality to these priests.
Just leaving a bunch of stone tablets with instructions on another planet would be poi
Amino acids (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Human Imperialism (Score:4)
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.
Re: Human Imperialism (Score:2)
Q1. I think there are good reasons to think we can detect life even with simple probes. James Lovelock explained this well with his daisyworld thought experiment. Figured that the one characteristic of life is homeostasis, and widespread life would do that to the planet itself.
Never mind microbes (Score:3)
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.
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Not sure if you are just joking. In case, fully developed plant and life won't survive most alien conditions. Microbes can. Transporting several redwoods across space is not an easy task. you have to keep them alive on the trip, and they do weight a lot. but planting them is even harder. With microbes, you just need a few cups of goo, and you are good to go. practically, you have to crawl before you walk, and walk before you run.
Preserving the environment based on scarcity (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A little premature... (Score:2)
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....
Should We Seed Life On Alien Worlds? (Score:2)
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.
What about T-Rump? (Score:2)
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evidence? (Score:2)
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 probabl
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> Any planet with lots of liquid water probably already has life.
We'll see fairly soon, won't we? Maybe even in our lifetimes. Both Mars and Europa show strong evidence of having liquid water, but as yet we haven't made any serious attempts to determine if either harbors life.
Send an outpost (Score:2)
By the time we've mastered interstellar travel I expect we got synthetic biology [wikipedia.org] 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
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What about consciousness transfer to fully synthetic android type bodies?
I keep thinking that the a reasonably likely way an advanced civilization would conquer the problems of relativity and distance is by altering the relationship with time. If consciousness can be transferred into a synthetic machine and time is no longer defined around human lifespans, interstellar distances no longer matter because a trip of a 10,000 years doesn't matter.
I would wager if we do encounter alien intelligence they will be
absolutely (Score:2)
Not today, but maybe tomorrow (Score:2)
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
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There's the issue that, after 3.8 billion years, anything that's still a microbe is probably genetically predisposed to not evolve into anything more sophisticated...
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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 [sciencemag.org] (i.e. about as soon as compatible conditions existed). We have actual fossils of life that formed 950 million years after planet formation [livescience.com].
Just Completing a Sentence in TFA (Score:4, Funny)
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.
We already have (Score:2)
HUMONS .. (Score:2)
I Read the Interview... (Score:4, Interesting)
.. 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. [arxiv.org] 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.
Betteridge's Law (Score:2)
No
Genesis Device (Score:2)
We'll be OK as long as Professor Gros doesn't use unstable protomatter in his Genesis Device.
Calm down (Score:3)
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!
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Captain Kirk would certainly do it differently, if you know what I mean.
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Re:The New Invasive Species (Score:5, Insightful)
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 :)
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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.
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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.
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No, no we do not. We have two guys who presume that evolution follows Moore's law. Evolution is not a smooth progression. It is punctuated by extinctions as well as explosions of diversification.
As for your assertion that there wasn't enough time, there was plenty of time. Early evolution wasn't accomplished by larger life forms but by typically asexually reproducing little bits of life. It was a sea
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Re:The New Invasive Species (Score:4, Funny)
So then why aren't Koalas driving us to extinction? After all they have twice as many thumbs...
Re:The New Invasive Species (Score:4, Funny)
They're pacifists, man... from all the eucalyptus leaves.
Far out!
Re:The New Invasive Species (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:The New Invasive Species (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Avoid seeding life where it already exists. I would think destroying the alien life and then reseeding our life would be a great start. This ecofascist pro-xeno thinking is alien and bizarre to to me. If it is alien life and it can't defend itself it needs to be ground under our heels. Our cattle grazing on Proxima b, our sheep on Kepler 437c. Only if they are as powerful as we should we even communicate with them so they can receive the terms of their surrender. Human hegemony for the galaxy on the backs of uneducated aliens held in a near-animal savage state of existence.
This funny story about Vogons comes to mind .....
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Here [wikipedia.org] is a show you might want to watch, then let's discuss that topic afterwards.
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And if some alien life forms interpret our efforts as an attempt at biological warfare, life on our planet might get destroyed a lot quicker than expected.
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If you don't feel the impulse to spread your genes when travelling, there is something wrong with you. It's a Darwin thing.
Directly applies to males only, females have a similar impulse to collect 'Sancho' genes though.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why not? (Score:4, Interesting)
> 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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Nice that you have an opinion. Not so very that you present it as if it were a truth. Even less so that you do it with such self-denigration. More so that you attempt to drag us all into said denigration. Don't project your self-loathing onto me.
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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.)
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We know how that works with invasive species here, don't we?
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Yeah, Exactly like if you replace "there" with "in Australia" and "Earth" with "Europe".
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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.
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"Why is it important to NOT seed worlds where life is starting? "
Even arguing purely from our own self-interest, we must extract as much science as possible from any local lifeform we come across before replacing it with anything of our own.
This ethic should be as applicable to Mars is it would to a hypothetical extrasolar system.
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Clearly, you have lost the narrative. Human beings are terrible and we should all be ashamed of ourselves for existing. Therefore, anything we do is also wrong. It's particularly wrong when is it done by Western civilization .
This is what has been pounded into people's heads for years, with elements of it starting with the ludicrous "noble savage" concept. Now, we are "thoughtlessly destroying the planet".
Human beings are the only species that destro
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I'm thinking, ff there's life there already, it's probably better suited to its environment than anything we could export there. And if it isn't, if it's so primitive and fragile that a few Earth bugs can wipe it out, well maybe that's tough. It played the game of life and it lost, like a quintillion species did on this planet. Now what would be a real shame is if Earth bugs wiped out the indigenous stuff, and then crashed and died out itself. But I guess there will always be something left behind that's st
Re: Why not? (Score:2)
Not for moral reasons, for scientific ones. I'd be very interested to see what evolution would produce without our influence.
There are ample rocks floating through space. We can select barren ones to use for our seeding experiments.
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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.
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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.