Should humans seed life and sapience on other planets?

[May90]

I suppose it would require us to first extent our life expectancy infinitely. The nearest terrestrial exoplanet candidate found is almost 15 LY away from us. Delivering resources for terraformation from Earth there would not be economically viable. Of course, if we colonize the planet first and manage to get resources directly from that star system, without having to go back to Solar system to resupply... That is so far away from our current tech capabilities though, I won't even estimate when we will be able to do that. 3000 years from now, maybe?

[Yunru]

Its enogh if we just send random microbes into different planets and wait. Chlorella algae should work pretty much everywhere. (needs only carbon dioxide, water, sunlight, and a small amount of minerals to reproduce)

[Powerogue]

Assuming we live that long as a species in the first place, eventually our sun will die out. Hopefully we've managed to do it by then. I imagine once we get to the point we're able to create fully fledged artificial life with whatever characteristics we want it'll be a lot more feasible.

[Kokolums]

There is no moral judgement to be made on this topic. It will either happen or it won't.

[Independent voter]

The only reason I can think to do is to hedge our bets. Say there's a storm of gamma radiation that bathes the Earth for a whole year killing all life or even an asteroid the size of the moon traveling at 1/10th light speed strikes the Earth, if we had settlements on other planets they could continue on without us.

But that's a religious outlook, meaning you would feel that the death of all life on Earth meant something. Science says it doesn't.

[GeekofFury]

Well, assuming we as a species can survive that long (atm I'm almost certain we can't, we've totally fucked ourselves, I'm just waiting for the problems were creating to reach a sort of critical mass), it's a tough question. I would say that Mars is a given, so long as our understanding that it is a lifeless rock stays true for the most part.

Beyond that it gets murky. On planets populated with life, our landing and colonization would definitely affect the natural order and evolution of that planet. How can we reconcile our want to go out explore the galaxy with this issue? I don't know.

On top of that, even if we manage to build technologies that stop us from making our planet uninhabitable, we're still kind of a terrible species. I mean, come on. We fear and resent members of our own species that don't look or act enough like ourselves enough that we war with each other over it. What do you think happens when we meet aliens? Our best attempt at economics so far is based on self interest, and anyone who doesn't make it gets left to starve, rot, and die. And our own basic psychology makes us feel shitty if we aren't constantly upgrading our standard of living (and therefore our rate of resource consumption).

Humans are fucked up. Should we really spread like a virus to the rest of the universe?

[Fahrenheit]

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?

If we're type III were already spread across the Milky Way.
I presume you mean should we spread across the Universe? In that case yes. We absolutely should. Especially so if in the off chance we've spread throughout the Milky Way and still haven't found other intelligent life. We owe it to the Universe to spread intelligent life at that point.

[Vynny]

Yeah because all we need is another world of violent territorial tribalistic conquering assholes to contend with. But in all seriousness, I think that it has to happen sooner or later, but I hope that we consolidate all of Earth under one banner before we do that simply because policies like MAD don't work as well when you're not living on the same planet and don't have to deal with the consequences of a global nuclear apocalypse.