We keep trying to extend our reach into the heavens, but the idea of panspermia is that the heavens are actually responsible for us. Which is to say, that at least the precursor materials that allow life to emerge came from elsewhere, and did not originate on Earth. Over a hundred years ago Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggested that the pressure of starlight could push bacterial spores between planets and we can extend the notion to interstellar journeys of hardy microbes as well, blasted out of planetary surfaces by such things as meteor impacts and flung into outbound trajectories.
Panspermia notions inevitably get into the question of deep time given the distances involved. The German physician Hermann Richter (1808-1876) had something interesting to say about this, evidently motivated by his irritation with Charles Darwin, who had made no speculations on the origin of the life he studied. Richter believed in a universe that was eternal, and indeed thought that life itself shared this characteristic:
“We therefore also regard the existence of organic life in the universe as eternal; it has always existed and has propagated itself in uninterrupted succession. Omne vivum ab aeternitate e cellula!” [All life comes from cells throughout eternity].
Thus Richter supplied what Darwin did not, while accepting the notion of the evolution of life in the circumstances in which it found itself. By 1908 Arrhenius could write:
“Man used to speculate on the origin of matter, but gave that up when experience taught him that matter is indestructible and can only be transformed. For similar reasons we never inquire into the origin of the energy of motion. And we may become accustomed to the idea that life is eternal, and hence that it is useless to inquire into its origin.”
The origins of panspermia thinking go all the way back to the Greeks, and the literature is surprisingly full as we get into the 19th and early 20th Century, but I won’t linger any further on that because the paper I want to discuss today deals with a notion that came about only within the last 60 years or so. As described by Carl Sagan and Iosif Shklovskii in 1966 (in Intelligent Life in the Universe, it’s that panspermia is not only possible but might be something that humans might one day attempt.
Indeed, Michael Mautner and Greg Matloff proposed this in the 1970s (citation below), while digging into the potential risks and ethical problems associated with such a project. The idea remains controversial, to judge from the continuing flow of papers on various aspects of panspermia. We now have a study from Asher Soryl (University of Otago, NZ) and Anders Sandberg (MIMIR Centre for Long Term Futures Research, Stockholm) again sizing up guided panspermia ethics and potential pitfalls. What is new here is the exploration of the philosophy of the directed panspermia idea.
Image: Can life be spread by comets? Comet 2I/Borisov is only the second interstellar object known to have passed through our Solar System, but presumably there are vast numbers of such objects moving between the stars. In this image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the comet appears in front of a distant background spiral galaxy (2MASX J10500165-0152029, also known as PGC 32442). The galaxy’s bright central core is smeared in the image because Hubble was tracking the comet. Borisov was approximately 326 million kilometres from Earth in this exposure. Its tail of ejected dust streaks off to the upper right. Credit: ESA/Hubble.
Spreading life is perhaps more feasible than we might imagine at first glance. We have achieved interstellar capabilities already, with the two Voyagers, Pioneers 10 and 11 and New Horizons on hyperbolic trajectories that will never return to the Solar System. Remember, time is flexible here because a directed panspermia effort would be long-term, seeding numerous stars over periods of tens of thousands of years. The payload need not be large, and Soryl and Sandberg consider a 1 kg container sufficient, one containing freeze-dried bacterial spores inside water-dissoluble UV protective sheaths. Such spores could survive millions of years in transit:
…desiccation and freezing makes D. radiodurans able to survive radiation doses of 140 kGy, equivalent to hundreds of millions of years of background radiation on Earth. A simple opening mechanism such as thermal expansion could release them randomly in a habitable zone without requiring the use of electronic components. Moreover, normal bacteria can be artificially evolved for extreme radiation tolerance, in addition to other traits that would increase their chances of surviving the journey intact. Further genetic modifications are also possible so that upon landing on suitable exoplanets, evolutionary processes could be accelerated by a factor of ∼1000 to facilitate terraforming, eventually resulting in Earth-like ecological diversity.
If the notion seems science fictional, remember that it’s also relatively inexpensive compared to instrumented payload packages or certainly manned interstellar missions. Right now when talking about getting instrumentation of any kind to another star, we’re looking at gram-scale payloads capable of being boosted to a substantial portion of lightspeed, but directed panspermia could even employ comet nuclei inoculated with life, all moving at far slower speeds. And we know of some microorganisms fully capable of surviving hypervelocity impacts, thus enabling natural panspermia.
So should we attempt such a thing, and if so, what would be our motivation? The idea of biocentrism is that life has intrinsic merit. I’ve seen it suggested that if we discover that life is not ubiquitous, we should take that as meaning we have an obligation to seed the galaxy. Another consideration, though, is whether life invariably produces sentience over time. It’s one thing to maximize life itself, but if our actions produce it on locations outside Earth, do we then have a responsibility for the potential suffering of sentient beings given we have no control over the conditions they will inhabit?
That latter point seems abstract in the extreme to me, but the authors note that ‘welfarism,’ which assesses the intrinsic value of well-being, is an ethical position that illuminates the all but God-like perspective of some directed panspermia thinking. We are, after all, talking about the creation of living systems that, over billions of years of evolution, could produce fully aware, intelligent beings, and thus we have to become philosophers, some would argue, as well as scientists, and moral philosophers at that:
While in some cases it might be worthwhile to bring sentient beings into existence, this cannot be assumed a priori in the same way that the creation of additional life is necessarily positive for proponents of life-maximising views; the desirability of a sentient being’s existence is instead contingent upon their living a good life.
Good grief… Now ponder the even more speculative cost of waiting to do directed panspermia. Every minute we wait to develop systems for directed panspermia, we lose prospective planets. After all, the universe, the authors point out, is expanding in an accelerated way (at least for now, as some recent studies have pointed out), and for every year in which we fail to attempt directed panspermia, three galaxies slip beyond our capability of ever reaching them. By the authors’ calculations, we lose on the order of one billion potentially habitable planets each year as a result of this expansion.
These are long-term thoughts indeed. What the authors are saying is reminiscent in some ways of the SETI/METI debate. Should we do something we have the capability of doing when we have no consensus on risk? In this case, we have only begun to explore what ‘risk’ even means. Is it risk of creating “astronomical levels of suffering” in created biospheres down the road? Soryl and Sandberg use the term, thinking directed panspermia should not be attempted until we have a better understanding of the issue of sentient welfare as well as technologies that can be fine-tuned to the task:
Until then, we propose a moratorium on the development of panspermia technologies – at least, until we have a clear strategy for their implementation without risking the creation of astronomical suffering. A moratorium should be seen as an opportunity for engaging in more dialogue about the ethical permissibility of directed panspermia so that it can’t happen without widespread agreement between people interested in the long-term future value of space. By accelerating discourse about it, we hope that existing normative and empirical uncertainties surrounding its implementation (at different timescales) can be resolved. Moreover, we hope to increase awareness about the possibility of S-risks resulting from space missions – not only limited to panspermia.
By S-risks, the authors refer to those risks of astronomical suffering. They assume we need to explore further what they call ‘the ethics of organised complexity.’ These are philosophical questions that are remote from ongoing space exploration, but building up a body of thought on the implications of new technologies cannot be a bad thing.
That said, is the idea of astronomical suffering viable? Life of any kind produces suffering, does it not, yet we choose it for ourselves as opposed to the alternative. I’m reminded of an online forum I once participated in when the question of existential risks to Earth by an errant asteroid came up. In the midst of asteroid mitigation questions, someone asked whether we should attempt to save Earth from a life-killer impact in the first place. Was our species worth saving given its history?
But of course it is, because we choose to live rather than die. Extending that, if we knew that we could create life that would evolve into intelligent beings, would we be responsible for their experience of life in the remote future? It’s hard to see this staying the hand of anyone seriously attempting directed panspermia. What would definitely put the brakes on it would be the discovery that life occurs widely around other stars, in which case we should leave these ecosystems to their own destiny. My suspicion is that this is exactly what our next generation telescopes and probes will discover.
The paper is Soryl & Sandberg, “To Seed or Not to Seed: Estimating the Ethical Value of Directed Panspermia,” Acta Astronautice 22 March 2025 (full text). The Mautner and Matloff paper is “Directed Panspermia: A Technical and Ethical Evaluation of Seeding the Universe,” JBIS, Vol. 32, pp. 419-423, 1979.
At least it can’t hurt to think about aliens…
The ‘panzoic effect’: the benefits of thinking about alien life
By Graham Lau
https://psyche.co/ideas/the-panzoic-effect-the-benefits-of-thinking-about-alien-life
Reflecting on the potential for extraterrestrial life can inspire awe and have a profound effect on your worldview
In 1985, the author Frank White coined the term ‘overview effect’ to describe something striking that happens to people who have been to space. The term would become the title of White’s 1987 book that popularised the concept: after gazing down at Earth, he observed, some astronauts report a change in their worldview. They describe feeling a oneness with humanity and our biosphere, and an awareness of the precarious nature of our existence.
Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space explorer, recounted that after returning from space she was never again bothered by rush-hour traffic or being late to a meeting. And after William Shatner, who played Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, returned from his own suborbital space trip in 2021, he wrote in Variety magazine that: ‘It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart.’ [Shatner also said after that same jaunt that the blackness of the void terrified him; so much for Captain Kirk.]
The overview effect ties into something that is much larger about humanity: we can be roused through experiences of wonder and awe to think in bigger ways about ourselves, and to be more compassionate and understanding.
I have never looked down at the Earth from space myself, but I believe it’s possible to experience a similarly profound perspective shift by looking outward from our planet, too. As an astrobiologist and science communicator, I spend my days thinking about the possibility of alien life, considering what – or who – is out there among the stars. The idea that our seemingly barren Universe might contain an abundance of living creatures fills me with a sense of awe, and it has transformed how I see the world. I call this grand shift in perspective the ‘panzoic effect’.
Looking at the night sky and wondering what those celestial lights might be is something humans have done since before written history. Thousands of years ago, people from Babylonia to China and from the Americas to Aboriginal Australia saw part of themselves reflected in the heavens.
In ancient Greece, Anaximander proposed that Earth was a body floating in an infinite void, and Epicurus wrote that: ‘There is an unlimited number of cosmoi [worlds], and some are similar to this one and some are dissimilar.’ Much later, thinkers such as Giordano Bruno would argue not only for a multitude of worlds but also for the potential for multitudes of intelligent beings beyond Earth.
If there are aliens out there, we could be very near to finding some of them
The scientific study of astrobiology, though, is a more recent effort. By investigating the origins, evolution and distribution of life in the Universe, it asks: ‘Where does life come from?’, ‘How does a living world change over time?’ and ‘Might there be other life out there?’ I’ve been fascinated by these questions for much of my own life: at first through science fiction, and then later in my research and science communication. But along the way, I’ve seen significant changes in how we go about seeking answers.
Astrobiology was once a speculative discipline – viewed sceptically by many scientists in the 20th century – but it is now mainstream. Today, it is no longer about whether looking for aliens is worthwhile, rather now our focus is on what methods, technologies and space missions will best increase the likelihood of finding them – we’ve gone from ‘So what?’ to ‘Now what?’
Moreover, in recent years the possibility of success has drawn tantalisingly close. Since 2000, we’ve confirmed the existence of more than 5,000 exoplanets – before that, the count was around 30 – with seemingly countless more awaiting discovery. Here in our own solar system, we now know that ancient Mars had liquid surface water and a much different climate, and that ancient Venus may also have been habitable. And icy moons with potential subsurface oceans like Europa and Enceladus – orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, respectively – have tantalised us with the possibility of deep ocean biospheres. Even if there is no other life here around our Sun, the exoplanets we’ve found have intimated a great many worlds that could possibly be home to other biospheres.
All this is culminating in a profound idea – if there are aliens out there, we could be very near to finding some of them. Of course, there is a possibility that life may have arisen only once, here on Earth. Until we find definitive evidence – be it a Martian microbe, signs of life on an icy moon or in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, or some signal of alien technology – we cannot claim any certainty. However, in light of recent discoveries, I’ve met many astrobiologists who will adamantly state that alien life has to be out there.
A visit to an astrobiology conference these days will reveal a number of optimistic scholars who think it’s not a matter of ‘if’ but a matter of ‘when’ at this point. (White, incidentally, shares this view. ‘Given what we know, it seems really likely that some form of life has arisen elsewhere,’ he told me recently.)
What if alien life is not just present, but abundant? What if there are myriad worlds afar where life has happened, perhaps even with some similarities to our own? There may even be other civilisations out there that have developed their own art, philosophy and science. Convergent evolution suggests that some alien forms may resemble Earth life in some ways while others could be utterly unrecognisable.
Thinking about alien life is not just a scientific endeavour; it’s a call to be better stewards of our world
It’s by reflecting on these ideas that you can take the first steps to experiencing what I call the panzoic effect. Like the overview effect, thinking about a possible abundance of life in the Universe can lead you to look with fresh eyes at humanity and life on Earth.
For example, the search for alien life drives us to consider the range of possible settings for life to emerge and to evolve, and to consider how different the story could have been for our own world. We know that Earth life has faced many threats through the past – impacts from space, largescale volcanism, rapid changes in climate, and so on. And yet, as the character Ian Malcolm states in Jurassic Park (1990), life truly has found a way. Extinctions for some have led to opening of ecosystems for others. Life has had a long, complex history on our planet.
And when we contemplate the vastness of space and the possibilities for extraterrestrial life, we’re often reminded of our shared humanity and responsibilities to life on our planet. In this way, thinking about alien life is not just a scientific endeavour or a means to frame our considerations of the future; it’s a call to be better stewards of our world and more compassionate members of the cosmos.
Most of all, though, when I reflect on the possible abundance of alien life, it fills me with wonder and awe. In recent years, psychologists have shown that these are powerful, perspective-changing emotions. Wonderment at the nature of the world – from being curious about the workings of everyday things to wandering in the world around us – inspires us and helps us to develop new ideas and perspectives. Awe, meanwhile, is the feeling of being in the presence of something that transcends your current understanding of yourself and your place in the cosmos.
When I feel the panzoic effect, it encourages me to envision a hopeful future
The psychologist Dacher Keltner writes in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023) that:
From our first breath to our last, awe moves us to deepen our relations with the wonders of life and to marvel at the vast mysteries that are part of our fleeting time here, guided by this most human of emotions.
As Keltner suggests, there are many forms through which awe can come into our lives: from experiencing depth in music and art to feeling the grandness of nature or seeing people act in morally impactful ways.
Indeed, this is what may be going on when astronauts change their perspective following spaceflight. In the journal article ‘The Overview Effect: Awe and Self-Transcendent Experience in Space Flight’ (2016), David B Yaden and his colleagues conclude: ‘Awe and self-transcendence are among the deepest and most powerful aspects of the human experience; it should come as no surprise that they emerge as we gaze upon our home planet and our whole world comes into view.’
When I feel the panzoic effect, it encourages me to envision a hopeful future, one where our explorations inspire unity, and our shared wonder leads to greater care for one another and the planet we call home. Whether we ever encounter extraterrestrial life or not, I believe that the journey of seeking it can help us rediscover and improve ourselves. Much like the overview effect, the panzoic effect suggests that the wonder and awe we experience in this cosmic mirror – by looking out and, in turn, looking back in – has the potential to alter how we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos. And as White himself told me: ‘I think that’s the big question.’
Are we alone? We don’t yet know, but asking the question forces us to appreciate our existence here on Earth, while offering us a glimpse into our possible cosmic futures. Considering alien life is a means for considering ourselves.
What might be the relevance in an octillion-year time frame?
Equally, considering that there may not be any other intelligent life, at least not within relevant distance and time, generates in me the same awe, and the fear that we humans are precariously situated and may not survive in deep time…
We had best learn to keep and protect what we have already got.
That sounds like the same argument as whether the human race should continue to procreate and is just as silly. An intelligence that evolves billions of years from now would be suited to its habitat, at least as well as we are.
I often wonder how rare life in the universe might be, and it sometimes makes me cringe to do weeding or even clear moss from the walkway. But if we are the first or very rare, then it makes little difference what we do unless we sterilize our own world. Impacts on Earth will likely spread life to other stars over time if we leave well enough alone. A cell is a von Neumann probe.
If we decide to try to plant life on worlds that may already have it we should strongly resist the idea of sending aggressive, strong species; we should send things that a resident ecosystem can easily defend itself against. Granted we probably don’t have the knowledge to be sure we’d succeed.
On another hand, if there’s any chance of an existing technological species being there, we might want to avoid revealing the source of our package by changing course partway there.
What a wonderful and disruptive question. Of course human beings reproduce themselves continually on this planet within the same moral dilemma. How does the nature of this question really change when scaling life to new worlds, new systems, new galaxies? If suffering is inherent in life, what else is inherent? And what does it mean to a living universe, where for some it is short, nasty and brutish while elsewhere cultured and transcendent?
Well said.
AI Overview
+1
The idea of “rewinding and replaying evolution,” or the “tape of life,” explores whether evolution is repeatable and predictable, or if it’s contingent on unique historical events. While some evolutionary outcomes might be predictable, others depend on the specific details of a lineage’s history, making evolution both deterministic and contingent.
Here’s a more detailed explanation:
The “Tape of Life” Metaphor:
Stephen Jay Gould famously used the “tape of life” metaphor to illustrate the idea that if we could rewind time and replay the evolutionary process, the outcome might not be the same, emphasizing the role of contingency.
Determinism vs. Contingency:
Determinism: Natural selection, in principle, could lead to predictable outcomes, as it favors traits that increase fitness in a given environment.
Contingency: However, the specific sequence of random mutations, rare environmental events, and other historical factors can lead to unique evolutionary paths, making outcomes unpredictable.
Experimental Evidence:
Replay Experiments: Biologists are conducting experiments, both in the lab and in nature, to test the repeatability of evolution.
Parallel Replay Experiments: These experiments involve replicating populations under identical conditions to see if they evolve similarly.
Historical Difference Experiments: These experiments explore how past evolutionary history influences later evolution.
Examples of Repeatability and Contingency:
Convergent Evolution: Sometimes, different lineages evolve similar traits in response to similar environmental pressures, suggesting that evolution can find the same solutions repeatedly.
Idiosyncratic Outcomes: However, even under similar conditions, lineages can take different evolutionary paths, highlighting the role of contingency.
Implications:
Understanding the interplay between determinism and contingency is crucial for understanding the evolutionary process.
It also has implications for how we think about the future of evolution and the potential for new life forms to emerge.
rewinding and replaying evolution as discussed
Exactly. By my count at least 5 intelligent hominem species have arisen on this planet and 4 of them have gone extinct. If there were more than 5 then we can restate the case, all but one has gone extinct, so far.
Contingent indeed!
Diaspora
Unlike the Americans, Chinese and Russians, not all space explorers save their waste for the return to base. Instead, some of them dumped their vehicle latrines into the cold of space expecting they would all fall into the local star. Indeed almost all of them did. However, 38,000 years later, one gob of this frozen goo landed on an eco-planet.
Immediately when first ejected, and given a push away from the vehicle for safety reasons, its surface became frozen and dessicated in deep space. The rest of the gob was encapsulated in water-laden material that effectively provided a radiation shield, and the whole kilogram, which had been seething with the flora and fauna carried in living bowels, was deeply frozen.
This particular gob, propelled by its accidental trajectory, boomaranged around a gas giant planet, gaining speed, and headed out of its star’s reach. Given the density of objects in the galaxy, it was inevitable that the gob was pointed directly at a far system, which it eventually reached.
In a second accident of its trajectory the gob encountered a planet before it reached the central star. It was slowed considerably by the gravity of the largest gas giant in that system, then crashed into the watery suface of a warm, rocky planet. As luck would have it, out of the thousands of flushes over many thousands of years this particular gob landed on an M-class planet circling a G-class star.
The rest of it is human history..
The asteroid that did in the dinosaurs opened up ecological spaces for mammalian radiations to primates, apes, and hominins. All part of human history.
No humans have ventured beyond the Earth’s Hill Sphere, so any waste remains in orbit around the Earth or has reentered the atmosphere.
The Hill Sphere, which represents the gravitational sphere of influence of the Earth, has a radius of approximately 1,500,000 kilometers (about 0.01 AU), or roughly four times the average distance to the Moon.
You are assuming no energy input that could overcome that gravitic “container”. An explosion from an impact or human device could accidentally move some of that human waste onto an escape trajectory.
Still, Black Swan…
Jump start interstellar evolution: send tardigrades!
Good job, Paul Gilster. I like the freewheeling speculation, and the comments you elicit. I have only some minor remarks to add. First, you mention, “only the second interstellar object known to have passed through….” Yes, but a substantial fraction of the Oort Cloud may well have come from other star systems. Comets from that distance may stray into orbits inside 1 au, so the chance for interstellar panspermia reaching Earth is considerable.
Also, for where evolution might lead on another moon or planet, we should wonder about similar issues here. Marine viruses contain a vast store of unfamiliar genes, which, by horizontal gene transfer (HGT), can have immediate impact on evolution. (Incidentally, HGT is pretty much the whole story for bacteria. Ernst Mayr said it’s “all there is.”) My guess is that natural panspermia is a scattershot, which seeks to suit itself to the place it lands, and then bioengineer the place it with Gaian processes. Usually it doesn’t get this far, apparently
Finally, directed panspermia would be the logical course to take, if we could see that Earth would soon become uninhabitable for us, like Venus.
Thank you for your excellent posting about panspermia!!! I especially like learning more about Richter. I will link to it from panspermia.org, where I have early speculations about directed panspermia.
Panspermia in my view is total science fiction and imaginary. It contradicts modern science and physics. The time problem is the least of the problems. The hyperbolic trajectory is most far fetched. A comet might provide the energy for such a trajectory, but more likely is complete disintegration and a high probability of the extinction of all life on a planet the comet hits or at least setting it back billions of years. The same is true of a large meteor. Also There are organic molecules in space like water and hydrocarbons, but these are not life.
The radiation problem. Outer space is full of x rays, gamma rays and and high energy cosmic ray metals on the table of elements up to iron which make it impossible for viruses, bacteria, spores etc to survive in space. Life could not have originated in space which is too hostile an environment. The psychology. Panspermia is view is which out of balance since it over values the spiritual and the Animus, but rejects reality and the Earth which is the womb of life and mother nature which comes from below. It denies Panovumia and the anima which includes the imagination where there is too much of it with the panspermia idea. There is a small grain of truth inn the idea Panspermia which is an descent motif which can be found in religious ideas, myth, etc. God came down from Heaven and took on Earthly form or anthropomorphized and returned to heaven which symbolizes the spiritual. Gaia mated with the Earth, etc. I don’t think our wills have anything to do with the creation of life and we can’t control the contingencies necessary for a planet to have life which came first or are the a priori first principles of physics and too much of a will centered, isolated in ego world view results in a jaded prognostication and pessimistic future and Brave New World or man thinking he can replace nature and a lack of harmony with mother nature and the environment.
The authors’ arguments of “welfarism” are counter those of the Effective Altruism” {EA) movement, that not only considers current human life, but the unborn future humans, that probably vastly exceed our global population, and also include the welfare of animals (ending factory farming) which the authors of this paper neither consider, nor include (the cutoff species with “sentience”).
But suppose they are correct, and we should pause directed panspermia as the negatives (suffering of sentient creatures) outweigh the biocentrism argument. For the religious believers in a supernatural creation, the being that created life and humans on Earth either made a huge mistake, or had made the correct decision based on omniscient evidence.
How to separate natural versus directed panspermia? Natural panspermia due to physical processes does not involve philosophical questions. Directed panspermia does. However, while natural panspermia might destroy extant biospheres and replace them with new ones, directed panspermia could enforce a “Prime Directive” decision.
If non-human animal welfare, including much of the terrestrial biosphere, is considered, then human welfare has come at a huge cost to non-human welfare, except for favored species. Our pets have benefited, but have our farmed animals?
EA would say the latter has not, especially our mechanised factory farming. Is sentience at the human level to be considered a negative, or will humanity become less “bestial” in its actions in the future, and therefore ultimately become a net benefit?
Falling back on Clarke, his argument in 2001: ASO, was that the mind was the most precious thing in the universe. It was that reasoning by the alien explorers to “uplift” the man-apes to be able to develop technology using their monolith devices. The aliens also sacrificed other creatures in the atmosphere of Jupiter (in 2010) to uplift the Europans by making the surface of Europa warm and habitable. No Prime Directive there!
If there are sterile, but potentially habitable planets in the universe (but let’s be more conservative and be concerned about only our galaxy), I see no argument about bringing life to these worlds. We cannot possibly know how evolution will proceed and if civilizations arise, how they will live.
For inhabited worlds, we can enforce a strong “Prime Directive”, or a weaker one. If the galaxy is full of simple, unicellular organisms, then I don’t see any strong reason to preserve that status rather than pushing evolution towards complex life, whether with native species and biology, or with “tinkering” their biology, or even introducing terrestrial complex life, such as invertebrates and plants.
Panspermia alone is a very slow process. With known physics, our vehicles cannot even reach the opposite side of the galaxy for tens of millennia. Will humans still be stuck in the solar system for all that time? Will we even be around as a species to observe that achievement?
Evolution is even slower. If we use the Phanerozoic period as our jumping off point, the time to reach our time is over half a billion years, 10,000x longer than the panspermia probes to reach stars in a mirror position on the other side of the galaxy. Can we even contemplate what any surviving human lineage would be like in that distant time?
Finally, why should this decision rest with us? It assumes we are the only technological species in the galaxy at this time. Even a few other such civilizations, considering the same questions, might already be using directed panspermia. Shouldn’t we be wanting our form of life to compete with theirs, rather than being too concerned about spreading life at all? Agonizing over whether to spread our life, and even humanity, across space seems rather timid and counterproductive to our life’s survival. The main argument against it is that we would give away our location to predators who might extinguish us earlier rather than later. Such predator species would not be concerned about “Prime Directives”, but rather would be acting in a very Darwinian nature.
Alex,
Can we be sure that “Darwinian” evolution, meaning amoral evolution, is how conscious beings should, or do, function? It seems that we, at least, are capable of raising the question leaving a lacuna to be filled. I would personally favor directed panspermia simply because if our seed stock arrives at a world with a robust economy of life it’s hard to imagine making much impact.
We don’t know that to be the case. Introduction of non-native species has proven a problem on Earth, so existing ecosystems are not guaranteed to be robust to non-native species. It mat be that very different biologies stymie terrestrial life gaining a foothold, but maybe not. Our terrestrial species may be able to gain a foothold, even a dominant one. We won’t know until we try the experiment.
What I would say that if there is an extant exoplanet biosphere, we should refrain from seeding it. Leave that planet alone and go elsewhere.
Alex,
You make good points. However I don’t assume we will know anything at all about where our seed lands. We must argue from the most general case. I really liked your point about competing with other potential intelligence that might not be so squeamish…
This is why I don’t believe we should use dumb seed dispersal methods such as burying a life container in a comet. Rather, we should send intelligent probes, probably self-replicating, that can determine whether to seed a world or not. At each target star, it can replicate and decide whether to seed a world before leaving. Granted, this is an energy-consuming approach (more like a K reproduction approach), while a cheaper “blowing seeds to the wind” (r reproduction approach) could be easier to develop.
I am influenced by being careful rather than reckless (Planetary Protection, Prime Directive). It would be morally repugnant to eliminate a living world if our life were to cause the extant indigenous life to become extinct. This might be possible if a biocompatible world had only evolved anaerobic respiration compared to our far more energetic aerobic one. There are many scenarios where our life could eliminate most, if not all, indigenous life. I would like our panspermia probes to make good judgments before disturbing worlds.
We have reduced biodiversity on Earth by favoring some food sources, which IMO is a poor way to treat our home world and is ultimately destructive. can we not learn from our mistakes before foisting similar approaches on living exoplanets? Imagine a future where every habitable planet in the galaxy was covered by terrestrial farms. Ugh.
Excuse me for the mistake, Uranus or Heaven, mated with the Earth, Gaia.
The problem with the idea not much is written how the life itself came into existence, but it just cam from space and meteors etc. It’s a simple idea that is already explained by more probable causes that is physics and science. A slow migration or spreading of life across space may also be obsolete as we have already pointed out with FTL interstellar travel on past Centauri Dreams posts. For example if live evolved on Earth or Abiogenesis then the same probability exists elsewhere that is if the right physics conditions are met, then we get life. No migration needed.
If our universe is infinite and the Lamba cold dark matter big bang theory is wrong, then time would not be a factor, but it is o.k. to think that life is accidental too there is a too much being accidental as it would be extremely improbable due to the contingencies of life coming from outer space from another star system on meteorites. It would be one in one decillion chance that something like that could happen considering life must evolve on a planet first. A giant meteor would have to hit a planet and send a chunk of rock into space with escape velocity and a hyperbolic trajectory was this article says. The it would take a long time to travel to another world and then the life inside it would to survive atmospheric re entry without burning up and then the planet would have to be Earthlike.
Life evolving in space is a bit too far fetched for most scientists. It is the needs of life we can’t change is what I meant. Will still can and do have an influence on our own world, we have weather control capability which some people think is science fiction, but it is not. We still can add life to another planet by going there so the ethics and philosophy still applies without panspermia.
Synthetic DNA and Bioforming: Some propose using synthetic DNA and custom organisms for bioforming planets. DNA could potentially serve as a large data storage medium, capable of carrying information across interstellar distances.
I have read of unusual goey objects falling from space onto earth long before the invention of the airplane…
Maybe we should be looking for something like Star jelly (also called astromyxin, astral jelly).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_jelly
Sir John Suckling, in 1641, wrote a poem which contained the following lines:
As he whose quicker eye doth trace
A false star shot to a mark’d place
Do’s run apace,
And, thinking it to catch,
A jelly up do snatch
Henry More, in 1656 wrote:
That the Starres eat…that those falling Starres, as some call them, which are found on the earth in the form of a trembling gelly, are their excrement.
John Dryden, in 1679, wrote:
When I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star I found I had been cozened with a jelly.
William Somervile, in 1740, wrote in The Talisman:
Swift as the shooting star, that gilds the night
With rapid transient Blaze, she runs, she flies;
Sudden she stops nor longer can endure
The painful course, but drooping sinks away,
And like that falling Meteor, there she lyes
A jelly cold on earth.
Sir Walter Scott, in his novel The Talisman, wrote:
“Seek a fallen star,” said the hermit, “and thou shalt only light on some foul jelly, which, in shooting through the horizon, has assumed for a moment an appearance of splendour.”
An unidentifiable substance that falls to earth during a meteor-type event forms the background to “The Colour Out of Space”, a 1927 short story by the American horror and science fiction author H. P. Lovecraft.
Some observers have made a connection between star jelly and the Paramount movie The Blob, in which a gelatinous monster slime falls from space. The Blob, which was released in 1958, was supposedly based on the Philadelphia reports from 1950 and specifically a report in The Philadelphia Inquirer called “Flying ‘Saucer’ Just Dissolves” where four police officers encountered a UFO debris that was described as evaporating with a purple glow leaving nothing. Paramount Pictures was also sued for this movie by the author Joseph Payne Brennan, who had written a short story published in Weird Tales Magazine in 1953 called “Slime” about a similar creature.
In a 2019 episode of The Twilight Zone entitled “Not All Men”, a virulent star jelly causes the male residents of a town to become psychotic.
I love this. The first mention of Sir John Suckling on Centauri Dreams! Well done, Michael. Takes me back to my grad school days, and those were good.
Even scientists can be fooled:
Red rain in Kerala
Misidentification, causal association of coincidental events, and motivated reasoning.
More recently, we had an “unidentified object” on a Japanese beach which, after much speculation, including alien craft, turned out to be a rather prosaic object, a buoy.
[I am still waiting for the imminent government revelation about UAPs that you promised last year.]
@LJK
Thank you for that recommendation in a past thread for “The Inner Limits of Outer Space” (1987) by John Baird. I am reading it now, and it is very interesting. I think he would classify me as a “leveller” in the case of UFO reports. His psychological POV on ET communication looks very useful, even today.
Alex –
You are most welcome about Baird’s book. It was the first literature I came across that took a professional critical look at SETI, rather than cheerleading from the SETI practitioners or outright dismissal by those who could not handle the idea of extraterrestrial life, especially from a religious perspective.
Speaking of Japanese UFO stories, are you familiar with this one from 1803:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utsuro-bune
As Asian histories tend to blend fact with legend, and there were no cameras or other physical evidence around then, we will probably be left with the mystery. If it were true, then my Occam’s Razor guess is she was a foreign passenger on a sailing vessel that sank off the coast of Japan and she was able to get into a lifeboat which resembles our modern day thinking about UFOs.
To add: We tend to think of boats and ships as pointy-ended ovals, but many early boats, such as those from the Middle East, for example, were circular in design.
I think we should take a wait and see attitude before thinking about trying to send any version of our life elsewhere. If we find evidence (somehow) of life on proxima Centauri b for example, would we then send an object loaded with our microscopic life in that direction? Even if we find no signs of life due to limitations in our ability to do so, do we still try to do this? What is the benefit to us, or to whatever planet we happen to send it to? Why don’t we instead focus on preserving life on the only planet we know of that has it, instead of continuing to destroy all of it and then asking should we send some of it elsewhere.
I agree. We should not deliberately send life anywhere (and should guard as best we can against doing so accidentally) for both scientific and moral reasons. Scientifically because important questions like how commonly life originates and spreads, the range of possible biochemistries, and the processes of evolution can best (maybe only) be answered by studying life as it appears naturally on many worlds. Morally because the arrival of Earth life on another living world might be experienced there as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or “The Andromeda Strain”, not something we should want to inflict on any place.
Maybe the problem is the word “life” which makes us overly misty eyed. The conversation might be different if we instead talked about alien nano-machines colonizing and irrevocably remaking a habitable or even inhabited planet. We wouldn’t welcome such a thing targeting Earth, and probably not for any target in our solar system neighborhood.
The “problem” is, nature did not wait as evidenced by the meteorites from Luna and Mars we have found on Earth, and undoubtedly some terrestrial rocks made it to those worlds and elsewhere. Whether they had life on them is another matter, but the point is that accidental “contamination” has been occurring for a very long time. We may even have had some tiny visitors from other star systems.
As for deliberate panspermia by intelligent species, just because we are overly cautious does not mean some ETI may feel the same way. In fact, I can imagine some of them considering it a sacred duty to spread their life across the Cosmos. In any case, nature has already shown it doesn’t follow our guidelines for planetary protection, nor does it care.
@Ross,
It isn’t a binary choice. We can restore our world and seed others if we wish. We may even do neither.
I take a biocentric view on this. If there is complex life on planets, then leave them alone. If there is just simple, prokaryotic life, study and preserve it, but allow terrestrial life to take over. It may take billions of years, but it would be an altruistic gesture to the future.
If Mars has extant, subsurface life, I would take the same approach. Study and preserve it first. Then, terraform the surface so that a terrestrial-life biosphere can develop, suited to human habitation. This can all be done in stages, study and dome habitation, followed by expansion and eventual complete surface change.
Any worlds we seed in the galaxy may eventually support a biodiverse flora and fauna, and maybe a civilization. This seems worthwhile rather than leaving a sterile world in its static state. If natural panspermia is possible, then why not directed panspermia with terrestrial life?
@Alex
I agree, that if we get to point where we can actually seed other planets, then do it with some care. Nature follows the laws of the universe and we are the result of those laws, so maybe as others have suggested, deliberately seeding other worlds is a natural result as well. Also who knows what hitchhikers are on the voyageur and pioneer probes, and if one of those gets hit by a comet, for example, and that comet strikes a planet, then maybe the seeding gets done anyway.
I still think waiting and seeing what the universe can produce in terms of what we think of as life, before putting an effort into trying to seed our version of it elsewhere, outside our solar system at least, is better than just figuring out how to send it and then deliberately doing it without knowing what else is out there. We still don’t know if life arises naturally every place where conditions allow for it, or if it doesn’t and we are indeed rare. The decision to seed elsewhere or not could be greatly affected by which of these scenarios is true.
It could also be true that artificial intelligence and inorganic conscious machines are a natural result of a technological and biological society and the whole idea of seeding organic life becomes obsolete.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWSt2pke8y4
Multigenerational Interstellar Exploration | Larry Thomsen | TEDxYouth@ChoateRosemaryHall
144 views
November 30, 2022
Small spacecraft are the future of space exploration: they allow higher complexity and duration at a fraction of the cost of large aircraft. As humans continue to learn about the universe, sustainable design for multigenerational projects is more important than ever.
Dr. D. Laurence Thomsen (Larry) joined the Advanced Materials and Processing Branch at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) in 2000 as a Research Materials Engineer, after a National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory from 1999-2000. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Connecticut in 1999.
Larry has been awarded 9 patents, 3 licenses, NASA Government Invention
of the Year Honorable Mention “Methods of Making Z-Shielding” and authored/co-authored multiple papers and presentations. Larry is a Colonel in the Army Reserves with over 30 years of commissioned service in the Army Reserves and Army National Guard. Currently, he is serving in the 75th Innovation Command Army Reserves as a space portfolio officer. He is a U.S. Army War College graduate and has deployed on two contingency operations: Noble Eagle (2003-4) and Enduring Freedom (2011-12).
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
I cannot find a link to the Thomsen talk. Can you post the full link?
Alex, it is hyperlinked right at the top of my post, but here it is again, just in case:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWSt2pke8y4
Thank you. You know what women say of men: “they cannot see things right in front of their nose”. Getting older doesn’t help either. ;-/
Humans exist in the natural world. If you believe we are like other living things, the product of evolution, our intelligence an emergent property of complex brains, then nothing we do is “unnatural” and (if we choose) seeding the Universe with life is just as moral as birds accidentally carrying seeds to a new volcanic island.
If, on the other hand, you believe that we are in some supernatural sense different from “mere” nature — possessing an immortal soul or being made in the image of God, then spreading life through the Universe seems like part of the mission of stewardship, just on a greater scale.
Opponents of panspermia — and of human expansion beyond Earth in general — seem to take the very odd position that we are under _greater_ limits than other living beings. I cannot understand that position, nor the fetish for “preserving” lifeless ice and rock.