Mathematically, it seems like we’ll probably never be able to reach other intelligent civilizations through physical travel. Even at light speed it would take four years to reach the next star, and it’d take Voyager 70,000 years. So, chances are likely that we’ll self-destruct or the Earth will be blown to smithereens by some wayward asteroid or the sun will burn out, etc., before we ever meet another extraterrestial species (unless they’ve been around for a long time already and sought us out deliberately).
So the question:
Could we encode and broadcast enough of our genome, enough of our DNA, enough of DNA’s chemical makeup, such that some alien a million years from now might receive it and be able to reconstruct a human using their fancy tech?
Let’s assume that they would be able to molecularly print cells if we give them a detailed enough blueprint.
But how do we package data like that, transmit it, and preserve in the void of space? Would we just aim radio antennae at various stars and send out a signal on repeat for a few years? Would stellar noise render that sort of exercise pointless? Distortions from gravity? What about focused laser transmissions?
I guess, at its core, what I’m asking is if there’s any way to leave an energy/information-based “message in a bottle” floating around in deep space for a future receiver, not expecting to find it, to pick up and decode?
Well, preserving it won’t be an issue. We send it out there it’s going. It’ll just get more and more tenuous as the distance increases.
In terms of sending the data, like in Contact? I figure we could do it if we took the time. The human genome is one hell of a lot of data but it’s not overly complicated, being composed on only GACT. In theory it could be a long chain of base-four numerals.
Though how you communicate that this is how to build a human is beyond me.
What happens if the transmissions hit space debris, get near stars, etc.? Does the information stay coherent? Get scattered in unpredictable directions?
I mean, how do you maintain the integrity of your whole message if you don’t have a specific destination in mind? Is there any way to package and broadcast information so that you’d maximize its chances of surviving natural EM interference?
True, but it’s a lot to transmit with any fidelity. And you’d have to push it on a repeating loop. Can’t assume that it’ll be picked up the first time.
A human’s genetic information is far, far short of all the information that you would need to reconstruct a human being. It would just be a meaningless string of inscrutable symbols to an alien. DNA is not meaningful in a (conceptual) vacuum and the information it encodes is only useable for constructing a human (or other organism) when it is deciphered by the machinery of an already existing living cell. in general, digitally encoded information (and DNA counts as that in this context) is not meaningful except in the context of its use within the system that is supposed to decode it.
Even if you sent your original DNA off into space, let alone a data string encoding the equivalent abstract information, an alien who received it would not know, and could not discover how to use it, not unless it also received much more guidance from us (facts about intracellular and extracellular physiology that we ourselves almost certainly still do not understand in sufficient detail, and even if we did, we could not transmit in a form that an alien would be able to decode), or else it came here itself to study us and our cellular physiology. But if it were able and interested enough to do the latter, that would make the whole exercise of transmitting information to it pointless anyway.
Why are people presuming that we’d use one transmitter? Why not zillions of micro rockets dispersed from space in all directions? Nuclear-powered engines producing a watt or two to keep them alive. Hard copies on the body if found. Transmitters for multiple frequencies.
If you’re postulating a dead humanity to start with, then the time of travel is irrelevant. Even if it takes 40,000 years to reach a star, these could keep going for millions of years and reach multiple stars each.
This is essentially what people have proposed for alien civilizations when they talk about the Fermi paradox, i.e. why haven’t we seen signs of alien life if the galaxy is presumably full of life? They’ve come up with many ingenious proposals to blanket the galaxy with senders and receivers (with or without AI) so that every star should be hit at least once. The obvious problem with this is getting the hearer and listener in the right place at the right time. That should happen by chance at least once, but the odds of it happening by chance to us specifically is millions of times lower.
Why would we want to do it? So now some totally alien civilization, in some unknown location and time, is able to construct one person. Not nearly enough for a breeding population (and I don’t like the idea of a zoo colony of reconstructed humans anyway). Not enough information to get an idea of possible variations.
Wouldn’t we be better off using that same process to pass on knowledge? I’d rather be remembered for what I knew or what we made, than have a clone be the sole human on some alien planet, with no knowledge of what we did.
Heck, send them the plans for silly string, “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen and the rules for Scrabble.
For a complex multicellular creature like a human, even that’s not enough. If the aliens just the human DNA and somehow bootstrap a living cell for it to work in, they might still just get a HeLa colony, or something of the sort. Development of a human into a human requires not just the biological machinery of a cell, but apparently of a womb.
Assuming there’s an intelligent civilization capable of receiving the transmission and assuming they hit on the idea that we’re transmitting our genetic information and assuming they have the technology and skills to create the cellular machinery and an artificial womb, what a horrible life for that person.
Their atmosphere will sustain him. He will look like one of them. But he won’t be one of them. His dense molecular structure will make him strong, fast, virtually invulnerable; isolated, alone. They can be a great people, Kal-El; they wish to be; they only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you . . . my only son.
Why bother? As has been pointed out, extracting the information in the DNA (plus extra-DNA stuff required to interpret it) is very difficult. You’re bound to miss something. Then you have the problem of encoding it. Plus the inverse square law is going to kill you sooner or later.
Just send frozen fertilized eggs in little tiny rockets. It should be easy even with present tech to accelerate them to 1/500 of the speed of light or so. That means they’ll only take 500x longer to get wherever you think the aliens are lurking, e.g. 2000 years to the nearest star, a mere 50 million years to cross the galaxy. Their potential range is infinite, and you’ve sent the actual thing to be studied, avoiding any issues of extracting and encoding information.
Old joke: never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of magnetic tapes barrelling down the highway at 60 MPH.
There’s far too many problems with the premise to even make such an attempt worthwhile:
Where to point the signal? How long to broadcast it? What frequency? There’s no way to send an EM broadcast and have it wait until someone tunes in by happenstance.
To chime in with njtt and Chronos, sending the raw, abstract data of the 4 amino acids that form our DNA’s base pairs is hardly enough information for anything or anyone without context.
What if DNA isn’t universal? It most likely isn’t. So, even if the aliens received our signal, decoded it, and made sense of the amino acids, what little chance is there that their “DNA” is anything like ours and will be able to reconstruct all the biology that would have to go into cloning a human?
Even if it were possible, it may not be wise to tell hypothetical aliens how to build us. Seems like they could use the same information to develop weapons to destroy us.
Or the aliens could build a few breeding pairs of humans, enough to start a colony, and farm us. Yum! To Serve Man.
Anyway, what about all the gut flora we need? I read somewhere, there are about 400 species of them. Do we need to include all the DNA required to build them? Would it be wise of the aliens to build them? Consider how important we consider it to NOT let invasive micro-life forms from outside the planet land here.
What other elements of the human ecosystem would we need to send as well? Should we send the DNA for all the food sources we commonly eat? Can’t be sure if the alien environment will include humanly edible stuff. It might all be silicon and arsenic based.
Assuming that alien life forms have also evolved through a structure that is analogous to DNA, any form that possessed the intellect to receive such data from space could very well be aware of its own genetic codes, and recognize their received transmissions as such. It would then be a simple matter to reconstruct the DNA of one of their life forms to duplicate a human.
For example, if humans picked up a signal from space, what are the chances that we would recognize it as genetic data for a lifeform? And would we already be capable of using the data to reconstruct a match within an existing earthly life form? Maybe not tomorrow morning, but it would be kick off a research project with some potential for success.
In addition, even with a cell and a womb, all it would give them is the human animal, without any cultural or ecological context. If they were mighty, mighty smart, they might figure out how to synthesize stuff to feed him or her, but what good would that be? They’d know nothing of our culture except whatever else we could include.
And as mentioned above, there’s the “where to beam and for how long” issue. If we assume we can radiate it in all directions and keep repeating it, that solves that issue though that might not be theoretically feasible except for relatively short distances.
Finally, would the aliens be silly enough to build it? Probably not, if they’d seen the movie Species (if that’s the one I’m thinking of).