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> Personally, I think that one of the most important human activities should be actively trying to seed other nebula, stars, and planets with archaic life, sinc

> Personally, I think that one of the most important human activities should be actively trying to seed other nebula, stars, and planets with archaic life, since this increases the overall probability that life will continue to evolve somewhere, even if humans fail to expand beyond Earth. I think merely one Voyager Record[0] is not enough. We need to be sending millions of these in all directions right throughout space, and spaced out over decade intervals. Then there's a greater possibility of discovery/contact. We already do this to some degree with the Arecibo message[1], but probes like Voyager are better IMHO. [0] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

gooseus 3y ago
I agree to some extent, though I think the trade-off of sending lots of messages into space is lower than sending "seeds of life". A message has encoded information that can communicate something we're trying to express to another life form, but what is that? How will they respond and what will that response be? Much of the point of sending a message to other life is to find other life that can respond to us... but if we can't manage to make ourselves sustainable then a response may reach us too late for it to matter, I pessimistically think this is a very likely scenario. Sending out millions/billions of seeds, and targeting worlds where we believe we'd arrive at an early-ish period of planetary development, we could potentially jump-start the evolution of life on multiple worlds. Perhaps these worlds develop their own intelligent life, or maybe it becomes a world filled with non-intelligent biodiversity with billions of new species with millions of new physical and chemical innovations that a future intelligent race (maybe even humans, assuming my pessimism is misplaced) could learn from.

gooseus 3y ago

I agree to some extent, though I think the trade-off of sending lots of messages into space is lower than sending "seeds of life". A message has encoded information that can communicate something we're trying to express to another life form, but what is that? How will they respond and what will that response be? Much of the point of sending a message to other life is to find other life that can respond to us... but if we can't manage to make ourselves sustainable then a response may reach us too late for it to matter, I pessimistically think this is a very likely scenario. Sending out millions/billions of seeds, and targeting worlds where we believe we'd arrive at an early-ish period of planetary development, we could potentially jump-start the evolution of life on multiple worlds. Perhaps these worlds develop their own intelligent life, or maybe it becomes a world filled with non-intelligent biodiversity with billions of new species with millions of new physical and chemical innovations that a future intelligent race (maybe even humans, assuming my pessimism is misplaced) could learn from.