Should we seed life in this Galaxy

It seems in recent news that there many be many planets in this galaxy with planets that are Earth like in size. It also seems to me that creating space vehicles capable of transporting anaerobic bacteria stored for the very long trips (many thousands of years) is not too far from the possible.
Should we as inteligent life on this planet attempt this panspermia?

Sure. Why not?

No. For most people throughout history, not to mention most animals, life has been filled with pain and misery, and in the end we all die. For most creatures aware enough to have feelings and emotions, life is a fate worse than death; Earth would have been better off if it remained dead.

Mind, now that we are here and developed as far as we have, we have the chance to make life something that isn’t “nasty, brutish and short”, but unless we can start off a new life bearing world at that stage, we should leave it lifeless.

Nature’s probably already taken care it, so there’s no need for us to act.

Y’all remember what happened when we brought rabbits to australia?

What exactly would be the point of sending bacteria to another planet? Are we hoping that they would evolve into something? What good does that do us?

Yeah. It was good for the rabbits.

Anyway, I doubt 99.99% of planets seeded will have an indigenous life.

Hell, yes. And we should encode a really boring anticlimactic message in our offsprings’ DNA.

Us as Human beings allive now : No good at all.

Us as part of a living echosystem guaranteed to diout when the sun dies: It would give us imortality.

Though it is quite possible that planets seed nearby planets with life, it doesn’t seem likely that it works of interstellar distances. Certainly not as well as our attempts could make it work.

Not only would the delivery of such bacteria help life evolve on other planets, it would also help terraforming such planets (releasing oxygen from water into the atmosphere) which may be important in many hundreds of thousands of years for whatever lifeform is dominant here for visiting those planets.

Travelling at greater than c being most probably impossible, visiting other planets seems very unlikely for any complex biological being. Even if technology allows missing out on thousands of years of your society is probably psychologicaly very unplesant for a sapient being.

Also the seed ships could test for Oxygen on a planet before seeding the planet to avoid a large proportion of the remaining 0.01%.
It may even be possible to put sufficiently powerful transmitters on the seed ships to report the finding of oxygen back to earth observers (if they still remember the ships approx 1200 years after sending them.)

The seed ships could be relatively simple solar powered affairs. Accelerating as much as possible within the solarsystem, and then deactivating into a frozen state for the duration of the journy until it reaches a starsystem when the solar cells could recharge the ship as it approaches the star. The ships would have to be as light as possible to get the best acceleration whilst in the solarsystem but I’m not sure that would cause too much design problems.

Der Trihs, having an opinion like that is a sorry assed way to live life.

Not sorry-assed. Noble. Suffering is noble, remember?

Oops ,sorry, didn’t realize that I was in Great Debates. I think we should seed for life, even if it is defined by brevity and brutishness, for it is also full of joy and beauty. One cannot happen without the other.

You’re correct, though - nihilism is weak.

I should add the counterpoint. Such an endevour would be very expensive, guessing arround 5-10 years of the entire Nasa budget.
Such money could be used to improve life here on Earth, instead of the hope of life on other planets.

Bit of a sidetrack from the debate, though maybe it’s relevant.

What if it turns out that this galaxy has already been seeded by somebody else? Do we try and find them? And do we double-seed planets with Earth life, wipe out the first seeding, or just let them be??

Yeah, we’re not quite ready for such an endeavor yet. We should wait until we’re better at building spacecraft before we put this kind of project on our budget (and incidentally, IMHO building better spacecraft is what 100% of the NASA budget should be channelled into… but that’s another thread).

But hypothetically, it’s a good idea.

How is what I believe nihilism ? I specifically said that I believe we can make the world a place worth living in. I just don’t think it is just to inflict the millions of years worth of suffering it took to reach this point.

Millions of years? Wow. You’re not talking about human suffereing, you’re talking about ANIMAL suffering. And you want to try and stop that?

Let me tell you something, pal - if you want to get the wolf to lie down with the lamb, you’re going to need a lot of drugs. And the wolf is going to go to bed hungry. But, hey! Give it a shot!

Oh boo hoo for you :frowning:
Seems kind of pointless to me to seed other planets with anything but humans though.