Populating space

:itold:

Because we do what we can - e.g. colonise (if we can) - there is no inherent "right" to possibly emergent species/ races/ ecospheres on planets that we find and may be able colonise.
Should we take a look and say "Oh, that may develop into life and possibly an intelligfent species in a million or so years - we'll stay at home and die out"?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

If we die out then perhaps evolution has deemed that we should as we have failed to adapt to the prevailing conditions. Something else will have replaced us. if not then in a few billion years it might all happen again.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Evolution is a process of adjusting to the environment while being part of the environment. It has no plan or goal.

We are a part of nature.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Yes but increasingly we appear to want to be in charge of it.

 

Well, that sounds like a nice thing. But consider this. Every time we move into a new habitat (on earth) we tip the balance of some organism or other toward growth or extinction.

I know this isn't a justification for willy-nilly eradication of alien microbes, but if, in the natural course of the universe, a microbe that was inimical to earth life found it's way here on a meteoric fragment we would have no problem eliminating it. We attack microbes on earth (that may one day evolve into saintly creatures - like us?) all the time.

I'm just pointing out that if we extend out moral sympathies to the welfare of alien microbes, them we might as well cease all attempts at exploration right now. Every time we land on a new body we risk contaminating it. An when humans start landing, it's virtually guaranteed to happen.

I value human growth over human stagnation at the hands of alien microbes.

 

The more we create, the more we destroy. There will never be a balance.

 

Perhaps such a stringent non-intereference regulation should only be applied to planets which already have multicellular animal life.

If, as seems likely from the example of our own Solar System, such planets are a small minority, then we can afford to designate them nature reserves. Never mind the faint possibility that intelligence might someday evolve: protect the alien fauna & flora, just as we protect valuable ecosystems here on Earth. There should be a lot more purely bacterial planets, and even more totally lifeless ones, which we can settle and exploit without moral ambiguity.

 

If pond scum planets are rare, then we would be justified in avoiding those worlds and colonising all the rest. Let the pons cum planets develop in peace.

But-
if (as I suspect) pondscum planets are moderately common, they are likely to also be the planets which humans value the most highly, as they would be the easiest planets to colonise. Given a similar biochemistry to Earth life, such planets are likely to be quite Earth-like.

There may be a whole other class of non-Earth-like worlds supporting non-Earth-like pondscum, but we probably could simply declare those off-limits as reservation worlds, and study them using sterile remote operated vehiicles.

The Earth-like pondscum planets would be too valuable for colonisation purposes to leave as reservations, so the scum would either be eradicated as a potential biohazard, or preserved off-planet in specialised habitats (a bit like Silent Running for scum).

As I've suggested before, this preserved scum can be studied, recorded electronically, and even evolved proactively to see if advanced metazoan life could be produced. There may be no advanced alien lifeforms up there at the moment; but with a bit of luck and skill, it may be possible to manufacture advanced lifeforms to order (assuming advances in biology commensurate with all the other sciences required for colonisation).

 

Why get rid of it at all? If medical technology continues to evolve...

.... then surely humans, and other terrestrial organisms, could be immunised against native biohazards after a little sampling and research. The indigenous pondscum of an Earth-like planet could continue thriving, albeit in the shadow of grass, trees and people introduced from Earth.

In fact, I'd consider it more likely that our biota would be dangerous to the scum, not vice-versa.

Your morally-dubious suggestion about preserving the native lifeforms of a colonised planet under glass recalls John Christopher's The Tripods trilogy - in which chlorine-breathing alien conquerers planned to reconstituate Earth's atmosphere to suit themselves. A few of their more ethically-minded colonists had vague plans to build airtight shelters, where a handful of humans and animals could live on as museum pieces...

 

Making the two biospheres tolerant of each other could work in certain (perhaps all) circumstances, although it might take radical genetic manipulation on one or another of the sets of biota. I have elsewhere suggested that humans could be adapted to live on a planet with a thriving biota by radically engineering them until they use the same proteins and other organochemistry as the local organisms; at least then they could eat the local food.
Eventually this process could be extended to whole ecologies, perhaps.

There could no doubt be room for a number (perhaps a large number) of ecological disasters in such miscegenation, however...

 

these biospheres chould then be extremly similar to accept both sentient species, you can forget abouth silicum or ammonia based life forms, altough there will always be some room for some beings capable to breath a 1 bar nitrogen oxygen atmosphere, I know humans do fairly well at higher altitudes (less atmosphere) but change the composition even a little bid and you get trouble especially in the long term. Then again their are also are sentients like neanderthal who would experience little trouble

 

Sterilising the planet to avoid the dangers of miscegenation would surely be the biggest ecological disaster of all. In the case of incompatible biochemistries, wouldn't it be just as difficult for one biota to infect the other as to feed on the other?

At the worst, areas of the planet should be set aside as preserves for the native species - actively protected against accidental colonisation by terrestrial organisms.

How do you know this? All we have is their skeletons.

 

My guess is that mars is already heavily polluted with microbes from earth carried by probes! It will take milllions of years for new life forms to emerge and evolve into an intelligent multicellular organisms. This was probably how we came into existance as a species.

 

If we must colonise other planets perhaps we ought to go for a planet like mars, living in articficial biospheres until we can actually return to earth and undo the damage that forced humans to seek new worlds in the first place. Our history of colonisation on earth is not a good one; we have wrought death and destruction via disease, enslavement, violence and environmental degradation. The thought of humans tramping about on another pristine planet fills me with dread!

 

Why not just start NOW in undoing the fucked up mess humans are making? We have ways to prevent pollution but there isn't enough people to get behind the ideas that are needed to do this. We know how to stop the polluting, we need to just enact those ideas. If we go to another planet we will just fuck it up like we are doing now. What makes you think that humans will change their polluting ways just because they leave Earth?

 

Species have come and gone this is nothing new. Humans are now in their early stages of self destruction....won't be long!!

 

I don't. If you read my post/s I think I've made that abundantly clear.

 

Sorry, didn't read all of them.:shrug:

 

because they evolved on this planet, therefore we could asume that they can breath our astmosphere eat our food and experience normal gravity, experience no day/night or yearly bioritme problems etc? Something that's not as certainty for rest of the universe