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What Spreads Life Faster?

#1
Zinjanthropos Offline
Here’s an article I saw trending today...
https://www.livescience.com/microbes-col...omets.html

A comet grazing ancient Earth’s atmosphere grabbing microbes to eventually end up smacking into a planet that could harbour impact survivors requires an incredible amount of luck I would think. Not only does a comet scoop up life from one world, have it survive, it then strikes a planet that can support the life it leaves behind. 

But does life need a technologically advanced intelligence to develop to spread itself much faster into the universe? One that can work intergalactically. Could it already have happened? I think in chronological terms the universe is actually quite young. Just how long it takes or how many of these civilizations there are or has been is anyone’s guess. 15 billion years? Big Grin
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#2
C C Offline
(Jan 28, 2020 03:39 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: ...But does life need a technologically advanced intelligence to develop to spread itself much faster into the universe? One that can work intergalactically.


There's no getting around self-replicating spacecraft being faster. Both in terms of escalating distribution and being programmed to target planets/moons that exhibit bio-friendly signs via orbital location, size, and spectral analysis. 

Quote:Could it already have happened? I think in chronological terms the universe is actually quite young. Just how long it takes or how many of these civilizations there are or has been is anyone’s guess. 15 billion years? Big Grin

Although they could have been seeding life as well, the black monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey were guarding and assisting life wherever they found it (especially anything potentially intelligent). More direct interaction of von Neumann machine-beings with a developing species of the latter type might result in "cargo cult science" arising in the population, which would retrospectively look like beliefs in spiritual beings and magical practices.

The Earth, of course, has enjoyed an extraordinarily long string of "good luck" circumstances and coincidences. But most experts would attribute that to probability rather than intervention (due to the numbers, there's going to be a winner of the "as if there is an invisible hand at work" lottery). Similar with our mythological systems -- favoring that their emergence doesn't entail or depend upon contact with advanced space travelers. In a lesser sense, methodological naturalism is preset to exclude ETs as much as supernatural agents from explanations and causes.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
The ideal time.for spreading life around may have been when things were close to one another. Could an advanced civilization developed then?

Funny that without such an intelligence to do the dirty work life would have to depend on unbelievable cosmic collisions/explosions to get the job done. Practically destroy life on one world in order to populate others seems like some odd strategy. That is if life is some sort of consciousness...lol
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