Seeding other worlds
Lately some discoveries of exoplanets made the news, even one around our nearest neighbor. I can’t recall what prompted it, probably a discussion about one of those planets, but some days ago it suddenly occured to me that we could colonize these places not just with ourselves (humans), but instead, or at first, with Earth-life such as microbes. Something that would survive our crude spacecraft. We would colonize the planets, in name of ’team Earth’. Time and distance is going to make a pan-human society impossible anyway, and at slightly longer we can expect evolutionary divergence between different colonies orbiting different stars anyway, so we might as well not even pretend we are merely humans but ’team Earth’, whatever sentient or nonsentient life came from here. In a million years the microbes that we send to Alpha Centauri will evolve in to sentient bipeds anyway. Well, perhaps we can send some clever rats to speed things up.
I am too late bothering to write this, as this interview just turned up in my newsfeed: a scientist with the exact same idea: the Genesis Project.
Perhaps soon we will discover that it is our ancesters that were seeded by Alpha Centaurians… Maybe the panspermia idea has more merit than I used to think: it doesn’t take that much for a civilization to evolve that is able to send spacecraft with microbes to other stars. We are at that stage. No need for ‘space borne’ life to evolve, and no advanced civilizations with fancy FTL travel either.