Professor believes it is humanities "moral imperative" to seed planets with life

[Danny]

http://io9.com/5498015/professor-believes-its-our-moral-imperative-to-launch-packets-of-life-into-space

So this proffessor's basic idea is, because we are lifeforms and our primary genetic function is to propagate, like a fungus or virus one could say, they propose we have an obligation to launch rockets at planets packed with the basic oxygen and protein producing primordial soup as it were to seed barren worlds with life so, in thousands of years time, they may develop into a possible 'garden world' that can allow for life to develop and be co-habitable with life forms from earth.

Now, thats a neat idea but i think our space explorative capabilities just hold this back too much.

We cant accurately "google earth" a planet like 'Earth X' or something and accurately say if it IS barren or it might actually already have a functioning ecosystem we could severely fuck up with injecting some toxic substance, or voracious viral bacteria or something that is benign in our biosphere, but as an invading force in another could be a minor irritant that barely lasts after it makes planetfall, or something truly devastating.

Also we dont have any kind of drive behind human technology to get anything to a planet in less than hundreds of human generations. Would we even have a record of all these life packets after a few thousand years?, data is lost all the time after only a decade or two, but thousands of years? assuming we havent finally nuked ourselves to hell in some retarded mutually assured destruction i dont have enough faith in people regardless of technology, to keep track of something we might not even have evidence of working for that long.

still, damn interesting stuff.

[SRP76]

They can go ahead and launch bowls of primordial soup at every planet they want. They'll all fail anyway. If a planet can support life, life will already be there. If it cannot, the goop will just rot.

Honestly, I think people need to learn how to get to the grocery store without a GPS aid before we start thinking about sending shit to other worlds.

[krakenslayer]

They can go ahead and launch bowls of primordial soup at every planet they want. They'll all fail anyway. If a planet can support life, life will already be there. If it cannot, the goop will just rot.

There's absolutely no reason to believe that just because a planet can support life, it already will. In fact, it's the subject of massive scientific debates - the odds against life spontaneously forming in any given year, even when all the needed materials are present might be trillions to one, some planets might be swimming in a primordial soup until the end of the universe and still never produce life just because that incredibly unlikely chance reaction never happened.

On the other hand, life might be fairly common and unremarkable. We won't know until we find some (or not).

[Publius]

I don't know about a moral imperative, but sounds like a good idea. Like you say, propulsion is a big problem though. Give it a shot on Mars first!

[Mike70]

flashes forward 3.3 billion years to the planet Xandar V:

xandari scientist: "sir, it appears our original hypothesis was correct, all life on this planet orginated from, ahem, um, earth."

his boss: "falook me, qualotnax!" burn all the evidence of that immediately! make up some shit about the andromeda galaxy. for slapnar's sake, tell em anything but earth!"


on a serious note: this is a good idea in principle. someday the sun will die and long, long before that (say half a billion years or so), this planet will no longer be the one we recognize. the sun will continue to get hotter and brighter as it ages. just by way of example, our present day sun is 40% hotter and over twice as bright as it was a billion years ago.

so, humans either spread out (either directly or indirectly) or we are doomed.

[blind2d]

Doomed? I'm assuming you're referring to people without religion. The ones who have it certainly are not. Also... it's only a matter of time now before protoculture... can't wait for that!

[SymphonicX]

well I think its my moral imperative to spread my seed, so I can relate to this....

[Tricky]

Typical arrogance of the human race to think we have the rights to populate every planet we can get our mitts on! Besides, if I was created on some barren rock as an experiment to see if the planet could support life, I'd be pretty damned irritated with those responsible for denying me the lush world they live in on earth! I bet if you grew up on any of the planets in our solar system, earth would be a pretty nice place to be in comparison!

[krakenslayer]

Typical arrogance of the human race to think we have the rights to populate every planet we can get our mitts on! Besides, if I was created on some barren rock as an experiment to see if the planet could support life, I'd be pretty damned irritated with those responsible for denying me the lush world they live in on earth! I bet if you grew up on any of the planets in our solar system, earth would be a pretty nice place to be in comparison!

Life is an ongoing chemical-biological reaction that fights for its own continued survival - there's nothing arrogant about wanting it to flourish, especially on worlds that don't currently support life.

And life that has evolved to live on, say, an ice world, or in the atmosphere of a gas giant, would be perfectly suited to that environment just as we are perfectly to Earth. A rocky surface, lots of oxygen and nitrogen, gentle sunshine, rolling green hills and pretty blue skies would seem like a roasting/freezing toxic hell to a creature adapted to Io, Europa or Jupiter.

[Tricky]

Yeah but even on this planet which is teeming with millions of different species, humans still think they are the be all & end all & if we die out the entire world will end. Who is to say that we have stopped evolving anyway? we may well evolve into something completely different that doesnt have the ability to occupy other planets in thousands of years time...

[Danny]

Yeah but even on this planet which is teeming with millions of different species, humans still think they are the be all & end all & if we die out the entire world will end. Who is to say that we have stopped evolving anyway? we may well evolve into something completely different that doesnt have the ability to occupy other planets in thousands of years time...

replying to two posts in one reply here.

first: The scientist proposes finding planets with a climate similar to earth, almost identical if possible, but hasnt been given the kick start our planet hard to start the biological process.
But yeah, the biggest problem is we have no way of knowing if we would accidentally wipe out all life on a budding planet, or cause a plague, or over-right a possible biosphere with an imitation of our own.

Second: who thinks we've stopped evolving? the human body has minute changes with almost every generation, hell, with human science involved it will almost surely have a direct effect in terms of biodiversity from shots for diseases and virus' and something as simple as air travel being a modern convenience.
We're no longer really a species evolving to suit its environment but evolving our environment to suit us. we arent restricted to living in a certain spot for a dozen direct generations, so darker pigments of the skin for warmer areas might be more or less common as 5 generations of ancestry could end up living in any corner of the world in any environment.

It reminds me of some modern scientist essay or something from a few years back that argued that 200 years ago it looked like we would have evolved to have more fingers or a second thumb to cope with the vast levers and pulleys of industrial revolution life. But nowadays scientist predict the generic sci-fi three or two fingers, nightcrawler style, since most things we do nowadays require button pushing instead of tool use that we have evolved for up till now.
But noone can really predict where we are headed. look at humans and chimps, genetically less than a 1% difference, but our appearances and mannerisms, whilst similar are still different. hell, look at wolves and wiener dogs. Things can go very far off on a weird tangent and theres innumerable random things that could occur to our species in the next million years.

[clanglee]

Second: who thinks we've stopped evolving? the human body has minute changes with almost every generation, hell, with human science involved it will almost surely have a direct effect in terms of biodiversity from shots for diseases and virus' and something as simple as air travel being a modern convenience.
We're no longer really a species evolving to suit its environment but evolving our environment to suit us. we arent restricted to living in a certain spot for a dozen direct generations, so darker pigments of the skin for warmer areas might be more or less common as 5 generations of ancestry could end up living in any corner of the world in any environment.

It reminds me of some modern scientist essay or something from a few years back that argued that 200 years ago it looked like we would have evolved to have more fingers or a second thumb to cope with the vast levers and pulleys of industrial revolution life. But nowadays scientist predict the generic sci-fi three or two fingers, nightcrawler style, since most things we do nowadays require button pushing instead of tool use that we have evolved for up till now.
But noone can really predict where we are headed. look at humans and chimps, genetically less than a 1% difference, but our appearances and mannerisms, whilst similar are still different. hell, look at wolves and wiener dogs. Things can go very far off on a weird tangent and theres innumerable random things that could occur to our species in the next million years.

Evolution doesn't really work that was tho. It all depends on mate selection and which genes are passed. Since there is no need for human kind to mate for a specific reason. . . then there is no real evolution in our species. We have some physical changes dues to different diet and technology. But the human race hasn't really evolved much in the past few thousand years. It would take a reset of all we know to make evolution a factor in our species again. That or some kind of control program to specify mating pairs. . etc etc.

[Tricky]

We're certainly evolving height wise, I used to live in a house built in the 1700's, and once i got into my teens I had to duck under all the door frames! & if you ever visit a medieval castle those lot were even smaller! :stunned:

[Danny]

We're certainly evolving height wise, I used to live in a house built in the 1700's, and once i got into my teens I had to duck under all the door frames! & if you ever visit a medieval castle those lot were even smaller! :stunned:

Have you never seen 'Willow'?

Medieval motherfuckers be all short and whatnot.

[clanglee]

We're certainly evolving height wise, I used to live in a house built in the 1700's, and once i got into my teens I had to duck under all the door frames! & if you ever visit a medieval castle those lot were even smaller! :stunned:

That's diet and general health. . not really evolution. . . .

[Tricky]

That's diet and general health. . not really evolution. . . .

How about all those skinny pasty mo' fo's you see around these days that clearly play WoW 24 hours a day, and are about 8 ft tall, looks a bit like when you try growing plants in the dark :lol: they dont look healthy but they sure are tall!

[EvilNed]

:O http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Distant_Origin

[krakenslayer]

Yeah but even on this planet which is teeming with millions of different species, humans still think they are the be all & end all & if we die out the entire world will end. Who is to say that we have stopped evolving anyway? we may well evolve into something completely different that doesnt have the ability to occupy other planets in thousands of years time...

Yeah, but we elevate humans in importance because we are humans. We all support the team, so to speak. It's like rooting for your home country's football squad in the world cup, only more primal than that. We look at other homo sapiens and we see a reflection of ourselves (to some extent), and while we know we can't individually live forever, we might find some comfort in knowing that by colonising space we can help beings like us exist for a very, very long time.

Sure, there might not be much point in it, since the universe will end at some point anyway, but if you look at it like that then there's no point to anything. We've all got to find something worthwhile to do with our short lives to distract us from the inevitable, and helping mankind take to the stars and live for millions of years seems like a slightly more worthwhile hobby than, say, sitting in front of the box watching I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here or eating Quavers in bed.

Speaking of evolution, mankind has, of course, not stopped evolving. It's just that, at the moment, there is no specific evolutionary pressure that is uniform enough across the whole of mankind to make certain traits more prevalent across the whole species or in one isolated part of it. That's a big part of the issue - isolation. You just don't get it anymore. In the past, you'd very commonly get groups of people far from others, who would be exposed to a specific environmental challenge that would cause individuals with the best physical features for surviving that challenge to live longer and reproduce more, thus passing on those features to their offspring and "distilling" those features, making them more prevalent and eventually the "norm". This is, for example, how orientals gained different eyelids and body-fat distribution from Caucasians: these features allowed them to retain body heat and see better in the bright, sun-bathed snow of Mongolia and the Himalayas, where those features originated. Nowadays, you don't get that distilling effect because with international travel people move around much more, and are not usually stuck in one place for generations. (Also, technology shields us from the worst of the environment, so extreme cold is less likely to kill off those with inefficient body fat distribution if we're all wearing Gore-Tex.)

Space-travel, however, may re-introduce that element of isolation. It might not be very long before different populations of humanity, separated by dozens or hundreds of years of travel, start displaying new characteristics...

(Obviously we're getting away from the original topic - the seeding of non-human life - to the topic of human conquest of the stars, but it's interesting nonetheless.)

---------- Post added at 11:47 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:28 PM ----------


How about all those skinny pasty mo' fo's you see around these days that clearly play WoW 24 hours a day, and are about 8 ft tall, looks a bit like when you try growing plants in the dark :lol: they dont look healthy but they sure are tall!

Yeah, it's not evolution, it's just that in those days most people very commonly suffered from at least one of the following: malnutrition, famine, rickets, scurvy or a childhood disease that impeded their growth (many, many diseases will do that if untreated, and of course, back then, all diseases went effectively untreated).

Modern medicine and a deeper understanding of nutrition has allowed the human frame to more commonly reach it's maximum stature, which was a rare thing even seventy-to-a-hundred years ago.