Sunday, April 5, 2015

Laying down life on another planet

   Science fiction at times recalling, for instance, sterilizing selections of alien geography to deposit earth life on another planet, and letting sown earth life proliferate in one particular case, like Destiny's Road.  This supposes likely a similar idea that geo engineering or engineering habitability is given in rote and similar ways found on earth, but there are potential problems to this sort of thinking.  The writings of Interstellar seem to suggest, or possibly hint at such a problem, for instance, the exploratory gambles of engaging in interstellar space without so much of an inkling of where one might be headed, all the while given to another notion that some limited form of help might be provided by a higher intelligence (e.g. the writer) in limited form.  The explorers in such scenarios find not exactly habitable earths which is yet another problem.  After all sending a seed ark into the cosmos is likely not the whim of one's pocket book.  Even having a potential conduit for short cut travel, hadn't dispensed that extensive time might be needed in finding even the suitable candidate necessary, and if the candidate had been found with any pre existing life, then what?
     I recall some time ago Sagan's discussion on space, and the analogy provided by the ancient Greeks in considering the composition of space.  In this case, as you may well be familiar with, Sagan slices through the apple, and gives the reasoning provided on what might fill the space between the apple, or if the apple were so solid, what space were allowed inside the apple that allowed the knife so easily to pass through?  On the other hand, it seems if Nature on a life bearing planet were rife with life, it may be that Nature should potentially abhor a vacuum of unused space.  For instance, if one were to examine Earth real estate, in one small random measure around this planet, one might find teeming examples under the microscope.  On the other hand, in non life suitable conditions random samples might yield exactly the opposite, or in other words, little signs of life, and certainly one might wonder less investment possibility for life having evolved elsewhere.  It seems the problem, on the other hand, for merely throwing life down (and where writers get it potentially right) on the question for making Earth life suitable, amounts neither to throwing earth life seeds on a given alien planet, but making a tolerable space in such place for Earth life.  Here likely the other problem creeps in which  Earth life is squeezed out rapidly neither  being as well adapted to an indigenous alien counterpart habitat.  The ideas suggested in the movie Prometheus seem to get some things right better, I would offer in my biased opinion.  At least it seems, if one were intent on distributing seeds throughout the cosmos, one might not be as interested in protecting absolutely the characteristics of earth life, but some essence of it in the form of genetics.
    Alien drops genetic seeds onto an earth given to infancy in so far as hosting life, but clearly a nursery with better odds relative to most other candidate sites in hosting life later on.  The script might have included that the overseer(s) invested into geo engineering, or provisioning cosmological events that would shape and sculpt the earth in ways to produce predictable changes and given to guiding evolutionary processes in some manner that would lead to the outcome today.  In a way it almost sounds like intelligent design, although here the writer refrained in describing the 'shaping' as clearly that as opposed to merely dropping genetic seeds that would be absorbed into the planet, and lead to some eventual outcome of life as we know it.  The writer later concedes that whatever seed life were deposited were also tenaciously adaptive, but dangerously so in the parable of Pandora's box, as the old Frankenstein, or Golem story goes, and this in itself illustrating even in the case of the alien architects patient enough to wait for life processes to succeed in transforming its host, also indicates and illustrates the potential dangerous paradox waiting for life.  Very invasive and scarily adapted biology, develops with rapid evolution in order rapidly life seed a planet may be its own weapons of mass destruction.  One in that its invasive process is exactly given to such parametric genetic design, and secondly, in the absence of a kill switch, how to undo it.  

On the other hand, Earth life as far as we know may have been a turtle in terms of evolutionary time scales, or if waiting for the beer, someone spent a long time waiting for the brew to complete, and it seems this were likely as far as scientific evidence is given, billions of years in the making.  Certainly an old brew, but this creation method, outside of more synthetic and artificial constructs may have some advantages for natural life processes.  One it seems, if settling out life balance, humans excluded, might it be harder to find all encompassing invasive species on Earth relative to other places in the cosmos artificially engineered to take short cuts in evolutionary adaptation processes?  Or the turtle in terms of evolutionary speed for life seeding, may not be as bad after all, if one weren't so pressed for time, or in other words, it seems cooperative biology and building a cooperative biosphere that weren't so much hard pressed at rapidly out adapting other biology could be problematic in the synthetics case...as one could relate here, common agricultural weeds exist primarily because humans had the habit of picking undesirables out of the earth, and thus engaged in the process of genetically hybridizing a plant, so that whatever plant that weren't fully exterminated were left behind happenstance with more rapid sexual reproduction rates, or one weed left behind in the process returned the favor of genetic improvement coupled with the added space given by its companion species removal.  In return this would provide a plant not only hybridized to sexually reproduce more virulently but also potentially in more  invasive and efficient manner relative to other biology in such field.  Ironically, however, the less desirable versus the less desirable biology takes shape here, and it seems something of evolution's Pandora's box lay embedded.  Human's having gained significant foothold on a life bearing planet, thus begin to illustrates the dangers of moving elsewhere in the cosmos.

Here while in the other script, one human desires the construction of many arks that would have vast populations of Earth exiting the planet, on the other hand, is hinted problematic logically speaking.  It is after all quite expensive today, for instance, sending small payloads into space.  It is also even more expensive sending live human cargo, alongside what ever necessary artificial biosphere that need be developed to sustain such life.  Here I might have refrained in the script and having said, "Is there anything else that we couldn't do about our planet to save it again?"  The reality in such future, if given an apocalypse, a big percentage of life would be doomed, and there would be likely less getting around this one should imagine, or at least not with some higher level of save the human race alien contact here more than aiding and abetting with a wormhole, but also provisioning humans with earth to space transport systems and the whole interstellar kit to go with this.  At least thus far, a planet so pitted to spending its resources on surviving might have even more arguably marginal means for interstellar travel.  This is to say, interstellar arks are really a big huge investment for the economies of intelligent life planets that have yet to travel a whole lot in its own solar system neighborhood.  In fact such an investment I would suspect that one weren't talking merely in the lower rank of double digit numbers concerning overall economy, but high double digit rankings, and getting this sort of political traction in a democratically aimed civilization (nearly impossible).   I know people have nostalgia for private investment models, but the reality of a lone eccentric billionaire funding interstellar colonies would be an absolute pipe dream, if a given economy weren't scaled as necessary, and interstellar travel weren't already a given possibility to begin with.

It seems the best odds for putting Earth life elsewhere might be selecting representative extremophile examples found here on this planet, firstly, if one were to do it, and then having such life proliferate one should hope in the given proto life habitat of such environment.  The likely scenario of squeezing a niche of life into alien turf, on the other hand, risks much possibility of finding Earth life hemmed in further and further until squeezed out of existence.  The problem here with a setting about planting this likely simple and/or single celled organism(s) on such planet, is that you might be waiting for a wee long time just to get the atmospheric conditions right...here you might be thinking catalysts, or anything to augment the process in speeding up the conditioning process, and this short cut is probably necessary if one were to start today here on Earth seeding elsewhere, or it seems even with catalysts and having started today on Earth, we could still be likely doomed before we ever set about planting the next batch of genetic seeds to terra form the planet further.  Thus it seems likely a  colony either has taken up residence on such planet in a given sheltered form, or it is sitting somewhere above the planet in orbit watching the biological ant farm build up a possibly murkier atmosphere down below.  I am imagining lots of smog here.  If all goes well, and the expectant biology has brought atmospheric temperature and pressure conditions to within adequate norms for the next round of biological deployment, a new biology is seeded randomly around the planet.  Given catalysts one might be hoping/waiting a few centuries under most progressive and optimal estimates, with huge evolutionary shortcuts having taken place, and merely using a line succession example, based upon Earth's evolutionary history...assuming again, we have a genetic representative example for a similar state system.  The advantage of seeding representative samples aren't in flourishing new evolutionary biology, although this might be expected even in the centuries of waiting, but that seeding sets about the process of evolving atmospheric habitability, and secondly one hasn't even gotten into microbial conditioning processes to build soil, but soil comes from transport mechanism...for instance, winds depositing loess (a silt, for instance, that are blown from river systems where erosion mechanism on this planet originally produced such silt...and one would remember that erosion processes again were likely billions of years in the making, meaning some sort of liquid media were precipitating on such planet for a very long time to produce the erosion that would in turn produce the silt, that would in part compose the soil).  Of course, on this planet one could try to accelerate erosion processes, hence, creating in theory something like a very stormy planet through artificial atmospheric intervention, but I am wondering how this might effect the biology that one had sown, even being an extremophile...hadn't guaranteed that an organism were able to withstand some other things.  An extremophile might, for instance, thrive in very warm or cold conditions but do poorly if given enough variability of extremes, and secondly how to produce storms in the first place in a proto life bearing atmosphere when outside the range for something like hosting water in a liquid state?  It seems you might try raining methane, but I am not so certain of all this, and I am still wondering if these extremophiles like wind at all.  The problem could be that we may not be able to task handle too many geo engineering changes at once but need to steadily and sequentially apply progressive changes to be added into the mix of transforming a planet into a life hosting planet in ways that are neither done in one shot.  This amounts to a lot of waiting around, until conditions are right, then phase transitioning, new models online, or in other words, Earthlings better have more than a couple decades in this case, at least more than just we've reached the end of our tether last generation bit before fleeing elsewhere!

    Now optimally, examining a random sample of soil on Earth consider this:

Soil has a mean prokaryotic density of roughly 1013 organisms per cubic meter, whereas the ocean has a mean prokaryotic density of roughly 108 organisms per cubic meter.

Assuming a given colonist(s) have established into the last phase transition of installing earth life, it seems one considers the necessary condition of likely saturating microbial life, not just in small pockets here and there on alien turf, but everywhere.  This is likely why choosing a proto planet could be optimal if not for ethics relating to genocide on a given alien world for their life, but also considering that we might actually have the best success at seeding when having built the biosphere representing our own planet in terms of all conditions therein, and secondly in the genocide models, outside of trans genetically hybridizing your own biology to adapt to their living biology, it seems that one still has to contend with the added problem of terra forming that planet to your own biology's specifications, or in other words, I imagine, not as likely kill everything plant your stuff and setup shop easiness, and then this gets back to the original problems owing to adaptation through an artificial arms race/genocide model, doing so only risks the higher chance of elastic rebound of any indigenous alien life only coming back, but coming back more scarily and retributive in nature relative to another invasive life trying to throw everything else away, or having depopulated such an Earth like world in the first place, requires the sort of cataclysm that weren't conducive to Earth life investing in such a place for any length of time to come...what maybe a hundred thousand or more years before you could come back after you nuked a planet to make un inhabitable by anything?  Of course, there is a possibility if life out there isn't so invasive and generally ambivalent to our own, in the sense of considering our life as benign, we might do okay in small population colonies, but likely in a very limited population context, and one should imagine, likely leaving the legacy that some lone voyagers having set off for some new world without so much of a sustaining and successive fleet of new world colony inhabitant hopefuls to through sheer numbers at loss.  It seems throwing sheer numbers for loss, marks something of the transition period, for instance, here on Earth for the migrations of old world to the new world, and with this also neither in absence to all the struggles and perils in doing so if such were likely true in cosmic sense.    The more optimal well thought out plan, still rabbits all over the place in so far as phase transitioning a planet into a given habitable place until alas, the humidity is on average about right, the amount of nitrogen in the atmosphere is about right, the amount of oxygen is about right, atmospheric pressure and temperature are just about right, and earth life is already teeming in the microbial sense all about such planet, and so much more.  Here, for all the work done, the last equivalent minutes are spent populating such planet with bigger biology likely from one should imagine a cryogenically  frozen genetic seed bank.  All of this life came from test tubes or the equivalent!  But owing to costs in all the transport, likely nothing living ever set foot off the planet Earth, it just weren't so efficient transferring genetic memory in this form.    A science fiction script might have also been written, albeit not nearly as exciting to the tunes of reality in the following fashion:  Early explorers searching for life in the cosmos were actually autonomous machines, searching for the clues that could be fashioned for honing on systems harboring life bearing planets.   These machines may not have been actually as gargantuan as depicted in human fictional stories, but much more compact, and modest in terms of their capabilities, some maybe no larger than an average American home, and some even much smaller (for purely exploratory purposes).  Some were designed to out last the end of humanity and keep going if at least attempting to seed and deposit life as much as it could through out the cosmos, letting nature take its course.  The Prometheus model in so ways makes more sense in terms of seeding here, since if it is low cost to disperse genetic seeds anywhere and everywhere to some possible place that can potentially harbor life, there is a greater chance of neither sowing one's seeds solely in one basket.  Letting nature do the work of evolving any given rudimentary seed into something greater avoids all the expense of having to condition and release biology in the right sequences, adding that maybe if something like switches could be intelligently designed into supposedly extraneous genetic code, reaching a phase point could activate a new genetic sequence, thus at least attempting to stack the odds towards producing some intelligent life (if it were possible in the engineering context).  Low work overhead coupled with maximum outreach is truly the way to spreading life throughout the cosmos, and avoiding human cargo, means that the fleets neither deal with all matter of problem in travelling either the pace of a turtle or the problems of deceleration and accelerating living cargo (which likely should be no more than 1 g for any duration), but non living cargo can be accelerated at much higher rates for transport, and hence in terms of reaching relativistic speeds much faster sending non living versus living cargo.  The odds ironically for first alien contact may actually be with machines by the way designed by aliens as opposed to any living alien biology if it were intelligent I imagine, but that presupposing something like the wormhole's existence.  Sending living biology is expensive otherwise even if it is also unromantic not doing so.

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