Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the earliest life on planet earth.
We have some clues, such as the Miller-Urey experiment, which showed that the building
blocks of life, amino acids, could be produced under conditions present early in our planet’s
history.
But the steps after that, where life itself arose, are still largely an unknown.
Also unfortunate is that until we reproduce life itself in a laboratory, we’re probably
not going to know the answer to exactly how it arose here.
Earth’s earliest fossil record is basically missing, having long ago been ground up or
weathered away, but what rocks we do have from early in the earth’s history show that
as soon as this planet cooled enough, and the bombardment from comets and asteroids
abated, life arose very quickly.
This bodes well for life in the universe in general.
While we may not yet be able to reproduce the exact chemistry of life’s genesis, nature
seems to have had no problem with it and thusly would likely do it anywhere it was possible,
at least on a microbial level.
But it’s also possible that life might have arisen somewhere else in the solar system,
perhaps Mars, and was delivered here by a meteorite.
And it’s also possible life from earth might have likewise colonized other bodies in the
solar system.
This is an interesting scenario.
Say we found life at Europa, if they were genetic cousins through panspermia, that might
open the door for us to get their diseases as they might still be compatible with our
biochemistry, yet those diseases evolved and developed on an entirely different world.
Kinda scary, but then again, it’s equally possible that our immune systems might easily
overpower any such pathogen.
But what of life being delivered to our planet from another star system entirely?
It isn’t very likely for this to happen naturally.
Travel between star systems takes a very long time, such as with our friend Oumuamua, which
took at the very least tens of millions of years to get here from wherever it’s from.
It’s hard to envision spores remaining viable that long without something extraordinary
going on.
But what if that were the case, what if an alien civilization long ago started sending
out protected samples of life in order to seed the galaxy with it?
This notion is called directed panspermia and it’s a very old idea.
The first time it came up to my knowledge was a 1930 novel by Olaf Stapledon called
Last and First Men where the last people living on earth send out the seeds of humanity into
space to start anew.
It’s also been suggested that we should actively do this, and seed the universe with
our life.
In a 1979 paper and subsequent work, M. Mautner and G. Matloff, link below, lay out a methodology
for doing this.
There are many arguments, pro and con, as to whether we should, however, the most compelling
con for me is that such a thing might put native life that might develop in a star system
at a disadvantage.
But there is another angle.
An alien civilization could have done it too.
Sagan and Shklovski hypothesized that aliens might have done just that with Earth in their
book “Intelligent Life in the Universe”.
And that brings us to the canned worms because such a thing might be quite advantageous.
Can number one is a form of SETI.
It’s possible that if an alien civilization had seeded life on earth, they may have left
messages encoded in our planet’s collective DNA.
And there have been claims that weirdness has been found in our DNA.
I will make a more extensive video on that within the next few weeks but the second can
of worms is that if you are the first civilization in a galaxy, you would have the option through
directed panspermia to guide and sculpt to a degree future life in your area of the universe.
Such a civilization could seed life in the galaxy and monitor it with von Neumann probes
and essentially control all life from microbial development to intelligence.
Even scarier, if that von Neumann probe didn’t like what it saw, given that all life in the
galaxy would be biochemically related, it could deploy a pathogen devised by a civilization
billions of years more advanced than the target world and essentially hit the reset button.
And from that comes a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox, though I would say only
marginally so.
Maybe we don’t see alien life everywhere because the first civilization in a galaxy
always seeds, controls and guides all life to an end that never involves anything beyond
a certain level of development to ensure that no civilizations ever interact with each other.
This could be for their own safety.
No interaction means no transmission of disease between biologically compatible species.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently back after several
days of computer problems, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the first machine civilization
we establish contact with breaks down in the middle of making an extinction threat and
then sends a blue or grey screen and tells us to contact a qualified repair person and
be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel
for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of
this amazing universe in which we live.