In this blog post, I'm writing up a bit of sci-fi world building that I haven't found a good story for yet. Given my dedication to and belief in open lore and the use of the Open World Licence, I'm putting the world building out there for anyone to use. It is important to note that this blog post is world-building; it's not meant to inspire crazy billionaires to replace their insane ideas of human space colonization with slightly less insane ideas of Earth-life space colonization. Even if, for the world building, the better alternative narrative is important. We live in the real world, and the rare Earth hypothesis is most likely false, making both alternatives a waste of time and money. We have one planet; let's not waste energy on confused nerds who don't understand that sci-fi is fiction.

Are we alone?

One important question we need to ask before exploring any form of space colonization is:

Are we alone?

If we are alone, not so much as a technological civilization, but as a planet with persisting life, then we have the moral obligation to protect the survival of life in our galaxy. If we aren't alone, things get complicated. Space colonization, if we aren't alone, could be seen as an act of aggression. Maybe we set out to colonize space with benign intentions, but in the end, we are setting ourselves, as Earth life forms, up as invasive species. If we are lucky, we will just perish because the native species have had billions of years to adapt to the planet- or moon-specific conditions, so we will quickly get outcompeted, eaten by specialized predators, or made extinct by local microbes. In the much worse scenario, though, it will be our species outcompeting local ones, destroying local ecosystems, and our microbes wreaking havoc on foreign planets and moons.

So, let's agree that if we are not alone, space colonization serves no purpose for the survival of life and is generally a bad idea. But what if we are alone?

The Fermi Paradox and the Rare Earth Hypothesis

There is an equation floating around in sci-fi circles and among science communicators who are trying to make science more appealing to the public. That equation is the Drake equation. It is a rather simplistic and naive equation that tries to estimate the number of communicating civilizations in our galaxy, and it's the equation that gave rise to the Fermi Paradox, which asks the question: Why don't we hear anyone talking?

This question was based on big assumptions about many things, too many to list in the context of this blog, but it is fair to say that in the age of high-power radio, and given the then-current estimations of the parameters of the Drake equation, it was a fair question to ask. A question, though, that has survived its justified demise through its pop-culture popularity.

We are just another mammal species

There has been life on this planet for billions of years. Species come and go. Humans are mammals, and looking at the history of life, mammal species tend to exist for a few million up to a dozen million years or so. We know the fossil record only contains 0.01% up to 1% of the species that have ever existed. It is thus a weird idea to qualify the lack of evidence for pre-human civilizations as evidence for our uniqueness as humans. In fact, the Copernican principle should prompt us not to assume this, to assume we are just one of the many Earth species that made it to civilization level. Us being unique and the development of intelligence and civilizations is also captured in the Drake equation, where many aspects seem to assume a linear, one-time path toward the grand status of a radio-using civilization. There are other problems with the Drake equation, for example, it not considering moons as places for life to form, but overall, an important point to consider for colonization is that relying on a single species that will only survive for a few million years isn't exactly what we need if we want to ensure the survival of life in the galaxy if we are alone.

So, what is it that suggests we might be alone? It is the rare Earth hypothesis. The idea that the conditions in our solar system and the specifics of our planet are so rare, and many factors needed for life to flourish are so specific and rare, that it is very unlikely that any other planet in the galaxy exists that even contains life, let alone complex life or a communicating civilization that might use radio. Some of the 'special' aspects of our solar system are that Jupiter seems to have kept Saturn from moving inward in the early solar system. Another is that our planet and moon formed in a collision with another proto-planet, giving us both a large iron core and magnetic field to protect us, and a huge moon compared to our planet's size that also protects us, allowing life to take hold and flourish. Then there is our location in the galaxy; like the Goldilocks zone in the solar system that our planet is in, there apparently is a Goldilocks zone in our galaxy too because of a low density of supernovae sterilizing star systems.

Adding up such factors and filling them into the Drake equation has led many pessimists to believe that Earth may be a one-in-hundreds-or-thousands-of-galaxies coincidence.

If this assessment is true, then colonization is going to be a huge effort because finding a suitable planet or moon where life can survive for billions of years, especially in our galactic neighborhood, should prove a challenge.

But let's look at our own species, a species of mammals that will be extinct in a few million years. What are we even protecting life from if we deem ourselves the protectors of life and aim for human colonies? It is highly unlikely that life on our planet will go extinct during our own few-million-year remaining existence, and it is highly likely that a human-centered colony will go extinct with the specific mammal species (us) long before any existential threat to life on Earth manifests.

We are just another civilization

So, we may not be the tool; we could be the blacksmith. But there, too, we have to deal with timeframes. Our current civilization isn't the first human civilization to exist. It might be the most advanced, but it surely isn't the first. Other civilizations have risen and fallen. Sometimes a new civilization arose from the ashes of the old one, and sometimes the end of one led to a dark age or a drop back into a much less advanced civilization. It is fair to assume that peak civilization, like we are experiencing now, has an expected lifespan of a few hundred to, say, a thousand years. This means that if we are going to try to save life in our galaxy (assuming we are currently alone), we are on a tight schedule before the current civilization collapses, and we enter the next dark ages. If we are going to do it, we should really go for it, and we should do it in the next hundred, maybe the next few hundred years.

What if we are alone?

For this world-building exercise, let's assume that we are alone in our galaxy and that it is our moral obligation to make sure life in our galaxy survives past any cataclysmic event that might wipe out all life on our planet. What do we need to do? We need to assume the rare Earth hypothesis is true, so we need to do things at scale so we can find those other potential rare Earth-like planets and moons. But we do get to skip a few steps that our own rare Earth made, so things aren't completely futile.

AI vs. Human

Now that we have established that we need to search wide and at scale and that we should hurry up and reaction. We are nowhere near the capabilities to launch manned or unmanned spacecraft that can reach large sections of the galaxy within human lifespans. The closest star system is lightyears away, taking tens of thousands of years with current technology to reach. It should be feasible with current science and future technology to reach something like 0.1% of the speed of light within our 100-year time window for launch, which would make it take only a few thousand years to the nearest star system. But we are thinking rare Earth; the chance of one of those being the next apartment down the hall isn't exactly high. Even if we focus on the galactic Goldilocks zone, we should expect at least thousands of light years or millions of years of travel at doable speeds for each of our many, many spaceships for us to have some reasonable success, enough for the redundancy of life in our galaxy to reach what in computing would count as industrial levels.

Given that we plan to be extinct in a few million years and living in a generational spaceship isn't exactly a walk in the park, we should probably consider AI, not humans, to coordinate our colonization efforts.

The Tree of Life and the Nanny AI

So, if humans aren't going to be the vessel of colonization, what is? Well, let's look at life on Earth. At the root of life on Earth, we find the universal phylogenetic tree. We shall aim to seed prospective Earths with this tree, but not at a too-advanced level. The idea is to take a handful of simple single-cellular species just above the second-level branching-off points. So, we'll have five single-cellular plants, five single-cellular animals, five purple bacteria, five species of methanococcales. Roughly a hundred species in total, all primitive single-cellular but all with the potential of taking hold on foreign planets and moons.

The first bit of the AI we discussed in the previous section is a nanny AI. The task of this AI will be to keep the hundred or so single-cellular lifeforms alive in a many-generations way over the span of millions of years. This should be done in a very energy-efficient way, so no giant colonies, but still big enough to ensure mutations or cosmic rays don't kill off an entire species.

Nanny to Mother

Once a spaceship reaches a star system, it goes out of power-save mode. Work to do, real work. The nanny's work is done; now the nanny needs to become a mother. The hundred or so species need to get a more sizable colony volume because the spaceship is going to need to split up. Having arrived in the star system, the sensors should get activated, and exoplanets and moons should be identified, as well as their Goldilocks-zone status. It is time for the first split-up. Every Goldilocks-zone planet and moon will get its dual swarm of child spaceships launched toward it. A swarm consisting of 13 small spaceships: 11 landing probes, each filled with sensors and a small colony of each of the 100 species, and two orbital ships.

Do No Harm

Now, let's focus on a dual swarm. While we assume we are alone, it isn't ethical to do so blindly. So, during descent and afterward, the landing probes scan for signs of preexisting life and for planet or moon specifics that require bioengineering. If any signs of life are detected, these are communicated to the orbital crafts and relayed by these crafts to the landing ships. The colonies are killed instantly with high-dosage UV light if any sign of life is detected.

Customizing and Release

Now we come to the final two steps: bioengineering and release. The landing ship's AI gets woken up. Its task? Prepare the children for their first step outside. So far, the species were adapted to life on Earth with some random evolutions due to their long stay in space. But we aren't on Earth anymore, nor are we in space under the care of the nanny AI; we are on a planet or moon with distinct properties that need adjustments for first survival. The AI's task thus is to analyze the environment and make minor changes to the colonies before release. All of this with variations to allow evolution to take over post-release.

Pay it forward

The work of the landing ships is done; the planet or moon is seeded, and we can only hope for the best. But for the orbital ships, the work has only just begun. They move to the most stable orbit possible and go to sleep, for starters, for a hundred million years. Evolution takes time. After a hundred million years, the ship's most basic systems wake up once every thousand years for two minutes only and scan for radio signals from the planet. If no radio signals are detected, it goes back to sleep for another thousand years. But when it detects radio, a third AI gets woken up. The AI starts to analyze radio transmissions from the planet, learning languages, culture, religion—anything that is relevant for the great reveal. If the AI finds the alien civilization to be too religiously sensitive for a safe reveal, it goes back to sleep, but now with a 50-year interval instead of 1000. Finally, when the AI determines it is safe for the semi-alien civilization to know about its origin, it constructs a way most suitable for disclosure and transmits the body of knowledge of humanity, including knowledge about the Galactic Genesis project, with one request to these newest of the children of Earth: Pay it forward.

Open World

This world building can be reused under the conditions of the Open World Licence. To be specific, OW4-CU, though that isn't too relevant given that this is pure world building.