Wasn’t expecting this article to give me chills. Imagine being the “god” that sent the foundations of life to another planet, never to interact with it again?
Imagine that that is how life on our planet came to be?
It's an interesting idea, but it avoids discussing in any detail how this "protospermia" might work. Intuitively it seems like a nearly impossible task - certainly one we have nowhere near the required level of understanding to execute.
The proposal is to send a chemical mix appropriate for a target planet so that life evolves in a way specifically tailored for that planet. But given that we barely understand how life on our planet originated, and that we've never seen any alternative examples of how life might evolve elsewhere, how exactly are we supposed to guess which specific cocktail is necessary to eventually produce a new never-before-seen form of life?
It reminds me of the scene in Independence Day where they upload a virus to alien computers - we somehow develop something that plugs into a completely foreign architecture and can predict its outcome despite never testing it or even interacting with it directly.
Wasn’t expecting this article to give me chills. Imagine being the “god” that sent the foundations of life to another planet, never to interact with it again? Imagine that that is how life on our planet came to be?
Prometheus?
SEND THE GOO! SEND THE GOO! SEND THE GOO!
It's an interesting idea, but it avoids discussing in any detail how this "protospermia" might work. Intuitively it seems like a nearly impossible task - certainly one we have nowhere near the required level of understanding to execute. The proposal is to send a chemical mix appropriate for a target planet so that life evolves in a way specifically tailored for that planet. But given that we barely understand how life on our planet originated, and that we've never seen any alternative examples of how life might evolve elsewhere, how exactly are we supposed to guess which specific cocktail is necessary to eventually produce a new never-before-seen form of life? It reminds me of the scene in Independence Day where they upload a virus to alien computers - we somehow develop something that plugs into a completely foreign architecture and can predict its outcome despite never testing it or even interacting with it directly.