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by sentientmachine 4495 days ago
Our planet needs to create at least one offspring with a good chance of sprouting a fresh batch of DNA based life on another planet before we send ourselves back into the stone age. If we don't, there are only so many shots left for us to become a space faring civilization again. If our species can't get off this planet. We may die as surly as an ant colony in the middle of the desert. DNA based life on this planet will halt, without anyone to carry on the carnival somewhere else in the universe.

This is serious business. If we don't fill the entire universe with efficient replicators to speed up the consumption of all energy to equilibrium. Then the reason the universe was created will have been for nothing. The stars must not be allowed to run down without our first harvesting them for our multitude of shenanigans.

2 comments

> Our planet needs to create at least one offspring with a good chance of sprouting a fresh batch of DNA based life on another planet before we send ourselves back into the stone age.

I hate to break this to you, but evolution isn't about humans or dolphins or spacefarers, it's about genes -- evolution is genes replicating, using organisms as vessels.

In answer to the old question about which came first, the chicken or the egg, an evolutionary scientist answers, "a chicken is an egg's way to make another egg."

Also, at a more mundane level, by the time our descendants are scattered across all the local star systems, they will be so different from us that we won't recognize them or feel any special kinship.

But on reading your post to the end, I see you're probably kidding. Oh, well.

I believe that all life on this planet came from elsewhere in the universe. And only the life forms that can quickly reproduce and spread to other planets get to live on. Our meta species has not yet reached the time where we explode and spread our genetic material all over like a dandelion in the wind. Intelligent life on this planet is still inside the proverbial egg, and we are maybe 300 years from hatching.
> I believe that all life on this planet came from elsewhere in the universe.

One can argue that this is uncontroversial on the ground that life's precursors came from elsewhere. The only debate is what level of complexity is meant by "came from elsewhere".

> And only the life forms that can quickly reproduce and spread to other planets get to live on.

There's another, more likely explanation -- that life in some form naturally arises if the conditions are right, and there doesn't need to be a connection with another life-supporting environment. This isn't proven yet, it's just likely.

>> Then the reason the universe was created will have been for nothing.

The whole universe was created for nothing. No one cast a magical spell for it to come to being. Nothing that is happening is happening for a reason.

Its just some laws of physics at play.

We came to be only through some minute chance.