Hi, I know we're all eager to find out if there is life on some other planet or not, and lot's of research is done in this field. But, if a likely candidate body is investigated and no life is found, I think we should populate that space body with bacteria and other microbic or plant life in order to "spread the word of life" so to say. Maybe genetically engineer it more suited for the new home. By doing so we would give a fresh chance for evolution and if something happens with Earth, we would atleast have preserved life in this sector of space, if we really are alone out here.
Just how do you know what that will evolve into? By just planting a seed that you have genetically altered to grow elsewhere never insures good results or even if the seed will germinate.
I actually did a project on In situ utilization of LSS (Life Supporting Systems) on Mars using psychrophilic bacteria. The moronic children (I was in high school) were like..."Is there life on Mars?" "are we alone, are there aliens?"...My response was "so far no life on Mars has been found, I am saying to bring life to Mars" Use genetically engineered bacteria to change the environment
But since we know nothing of what the bacteria will become is that such a good idea? We have already proven that humans aren't very able to even take care of this planet and you suggest this?
We don't and frankly I don't see why it matters, and nothing is lost by trying. And I didn't say anything about it working from the first try.
I really don't care about any planet, I just want to live healthy and normally. If that means keeping this planet healthy so that I am healthy...allright than. Universe is ours, as long as we exert power on others (*if there are any) to prove that universe is ours. I say populate Mars as soon as we can, populate Encelados,Europa, Titan....wherever we can live however we can survive. Create ecosystem.
Why not? We don't know how life will evolve on Earth either. I don't see how another planet with life would change the picture.
What if we could just travel to other worlds through a type of machine like the Star Gate? It is possible that one day, if humanity can stop from destroying itself, that we could possibly build a similiar type of machine with the proper physics developed right here. I'm always hearing we must fly into the unknown space at warp speeds or FTL speeds. This seems like a waste of energy to me.
If these things live on Encelados ocean.... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! and they are not really intelligent... well than yummy yummy time food
we don't need to fly anywhere that far...lets eat the resources of solar system first. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
No! Other organisms have rights too. We should care about our own planet for more reasons than simply human health - although that is a very important reason, of course. I agree - if those planets turn out to be lifeless, perhaps it is the moral duty of mankind to give them life. If there is native life on any of them already, we should avoid contaminating and harming it. I'm not saying such a planet should be permanently off-limits: just that the native biosphere, even if only bacterial, should be respected and preserved by any human settlers. Certainly, if liveable worlds with no native biota are discovered in the future, people should introduce life there, encourage the formation of whole new biospheres. Does that matter? Evolution takes such long periods of time, it's irrelevent to us what may arise, unknown aeons hence, as a remote descendent of our introduced organisms. We might be sowing the seeds of distant future intelligences, who (although they will probably never know it) would owe their existence to us. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Perhaps we owe our own existence to some alien race that did the same thing to bring us to life. Who knows.
Explorations can be done by robotic spacecraft that will have advanced AI in them soon. You can explore over 100 things in space with robotic craft for every one manned flight to the moon. Which is better for exploring?
Manned missions, in particular, carry the risk of contaminating other planets or moons with Earthly microbes. Exploring space may inevitably mean populating it.
Manned missions none-the-less are required before colonization. I agree Robotic missions are fine for right now(cheap, easier, safe) - considering how fucking stupid and wimpy the world is currently.
I agree too (though I hope cheap manned space flight, including interplanetary tourism, becomes a reality within my lifetime!) Even with robot probes, it requires the utmost care to avoid sending an unintentional bio-load to the target worlds.
Yes, we should ! It is our duty to do so, especially in the unlikely event that we are all alone in the universe. I was thinking about this a couple of days ago but never got around to posting it. Thanks ! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
What do you mean by this statement? Do you mean God-given rights? How else might they have rights? Presumably they cannot arise from nature (from evolution). I cannot fathom the working of a mind that generates this statement.
Why do you think that travel through a stargate will be less energy-intensive than any other way? The laws of physics cannot be repealed. It takes a fantastic amount of energy to move a human-sized mass of matter across an interstellar distance in time for him to still be alive when he gets there. Not to mention the pesky problem of acceleration stress making it difficult for him to live through the voyage if the velocity is that high. The stargates on Stargate SG-1 used phenomenal quantities of energy. They had to invent a whole other "technology built by the ancients that we just don't understand but we figured out how to make it work anyway," the Zero Point Module, just to power them. Larry Niven wrote that story forty years ago. I think it was World of Ptavvs, but I can't find a good synopsis. Three billion years ago an alien civilization seeded earth with a bacterial ecosystem, intending to come back in a few thousand (million?) years and use the planet-wide biosphere as food. Something went wrong (war, pestilence, famine? we'll never know) and they became extinct before returning. And here we are. You don't have to be a religionist to believe that other species than humans have rights. However, those rights don't mean anything if they're not enforced, and that requires that other humans also believe this. It would be more precise to say that other animals should have rights.