Should humans seed life and sapience on other planets?

[Techno-Druid]

If and when humans reach a Type III civilization-like state, should we then venture out across the Milky Way, finding Earth-like planets where life could feasibly develop (not too far away from the sun and not to close to it) and terraform.

Should we seed life on these hypothetical terraformed planets? If we do, then should we also create sapience and civilization on these habitable, Earth-like worlds?

[Leyre]

Implying anything good can come from us

[Deleted]

I don't know I also don't believe it's ever going to happen

[GennGreymane]

I dunno

Maybe?

Maybe thats why we are here? 0-0

[Gracin]

We haven't even set foot on another planet yet. We are so far away from being able to do what you're suggesting. And not just from a transportation standpoint, but the act of terraforming, food production, general survival on another planet is so far beyond us atm. And while you question is a hypothetical, and it may indeed factor in the amount of time it will take before we are capable of doing what you suggest, you forget one thing. The human race, as a people, as a society, will be completely different from today's people.

[Jakisuaki]

I find it likely that we're going to have a "Prime Directive" to oppose this sort of intrusion. It's best to let life evolve by itself.

[Aeula]

Ehh, not sure what your exact definition of 'seeding life' is. But I'm all for space colonization.

[Dezerte]

We should, and probably even should preparing for "seed banks" to be sent out in space already. The transition between Type 1 and Type 2 is perhaps the most critical one, where nuclear war is a real possibility that can destroy life permanently.

[Guyv3r]

No. Not until we have stopped being a plague like race and start creating a sustainable environment.

[callipygoustp]

Hell yah we should.

[Ahhdurr]

A type III civilization uses energy on a galactic scale, so they would have spread to most if not all habitable planets.

[unbound]

If we actually can, then we probably should try. Hopefully, by the time we get that far in the future, we'll stop being jackasses to each other.

That said, we are realistically a few centuries away from viably being able to seed distant planets (possibly we can send remote terraforming tools as part of the effort). And even that realistic assessment assumes that we don't revert back to a dark ages in the face of rising religious extremism that is occurring in all countries (yes, even in the US...christian extremism is only slightly more mild than other religious extremism, and just as harmfully impactful to forward progress).

[twh]

Humans will be extinct within a few hundred years. So it's unlikely we'll ever reach Type III.

[Medusa Cascade]

I volunteer to spread my seed throughout the cosmos

[Thoughtcrime]

If we were type 3. We wouldn't need to.

Obviously, we haven't proved the existence of life anywhere beyond the Earth yet but at least here on Earth the signs point to life not really needing a lot survive. (Whether it needs a lot to get going in the first place is still unknown). That being the case it seems likely that some form of life will exist anywhere that it's possible for it to take hold. What right do we then have to go and write over that life with species from Earth? We have no way of knowing how those organisms will turn out. Life on our planet was single celled and relatively boring for billions of years, it's only in the last few hundred million years that anything interesting (by our standards) has happened biologically

Secondly, any species as advanced as a type 3, heck even a type 1 doesn't really 'need' to go out and seed the cosmos to ensure it's own survival. The problems we face on Earth are not impossible to fix for OUR civilisation, and we don't have the entire power of the sun / galaxy to rely on. With sufficient technology you only need a colony in one other system in the galaxy to be as utterly immune to extinction as it's possible for any creature to be in the universe.

[chazus]

We are so distant from a Type 3 that it's almost not worth bothering speculation. It's entirely possible, and maybe even probably, that we'll never get there. It's questions to be asking ourselves a literally 5-10 THOUSAND years from now. Nothing we know, believe, or understand now is relevant in questioning to what we'll need to ask at the point in time where it's relevant.

That said, it will likely be a moot point since by then we'll already be modifying genetics and biomes as it is so it may come naturally. But again, humans 10,000 years from now will not be remotely similar in mindset, so the questions being asked now just... don't matter.

[Doomislav]

I was reading a story that was about something similar to this. Mans first mission to a planet capable of life. The main concern was microbiology- cross contamination of microbes could wreak devastation.

It was an aspect of space colonization I hadn't thought of. So, no we should not try to seed other planets with earth sourced life forms. Maybe we could ... Influence how the new planets adaptation and genetic mutation processes work to encourage the development of another sentient species.

[Thaylen]

Like most other replies on here, mine is equally as misanthropic. I feel we NEED to invest more in space exploration and work to establish a sustainable environment for our race on another rock. My reasoning for this is only for preservation of the race though; we are actively destroying this planet and will at some point succeed. If the species is going to continue, we'll need to have setup shop elsewhere.

And <insert your deity here> help any other form of life out there that we come across. We are the most destructive species known at this point and seek only to continue to expand to what we don't have because we will never be content with just what we have. And for the person who said "hopefully we'll be better people in a few hundred years"... we aren't any better than the last few hundred, or the few hundred before that. Technology will change, our environment and the "stuff" we have will change as a result. But we will still be the same flawed species making the same flawed decisions that we always have.

[Skroe]

Erm a bit more grounded and more relevant near term answer would be what kind of moral / ethical responsibility do we have with regards to Mars and the Moon.

When the US starts sending people to Mars, over the years we'll start building infrastructure. Right now we very carefully sterilze any probes sent to Mars. But when you have people there, building facilities to use as a staging ground for future habitation, even roads, the entire careful approach goes out the window.

We've explored what amounts to a rounding error of the surface of the Moon and Mars. With Earth, the amount of surface area human civilization covers, the amount of surface area is uses for agriculture and the amount of surface area used for grazing are all known numbers and basically snowballed as humans spread across the planet and grew in numbers over the past 150,000 years. But Mars (and the Moon) are pristine. Geologically pristine, for tens, even hundreds of millions of years. What does happen happens on extremely long time scales.

The point is, the second we start exploring and or colonizing other worlds - forget about seeding human life - there will be no "take backs" on the footprint we make. Do we have a right to this? Especially if it eventually ends up in some kind of full-blown Terraforming? Because the Mars at the other end of the human presence moving from a few robots to a few dozen, to ten thousand to five million people over the next thousand years (lets say), will be a different Mars forever more than the Mars that existed for 4 billion years up to this point. There are few parts of Earth left untouched by the mere presence of humans, to the point that the concept of the Anthropocene has gained traction the past half decade as the science has pointed in that direction. There is absolutely no reason the exact same thing can't be said for the Moon or Mars. When we make our presence there permanent, they in effect, begin their own Anthropocenes, and "locked in time" Mars and the Moon are gone forever.

I'm a huge advocate for space exploration and human colonization. But the above has bothered me for a long time and I don't know how to reconcile it. My instincts that say "humanity should spread far and wide" conflict with my deeply held naturalist beliefs that do extend to anywhere where nature is pristine. That includes other planets.

Maybe it's right and proper our technical means to achieve our ambitions are limited, giving us time to resolve these moral issues here at home first, so that when we do go out there, in a big way, our experience here can inform us to make the right choices and thread the needle of both habitating and protecting Mars, the Moon and beyond.

[Schattenlied]

We should at the very least terraform and inhabit those planets, it's not like we can just only live on earth forever, something will eventually happen to this planet.