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Addendum on Anthropic Panspermia, and Two Thought Experiments on the Same
The Genesis Project
In my previous post, Anthropic Panspermia, I discussed Claudius Gros’ “Genesis Project” as described in his paper, Developing Ecospheres on Transiently Habitable Planets: The Genesis Project, which would involve intentionally sending spacecraft from Earth to “seed” life on planets where life ordinarily would not get a chance to take root due to conditions of transient habitability. Gros conceived this enterprise as being superintended on site by AI agents, as this is a project is a one-way diaspora of terrestrial life into the universe and human beings would not be able to witness the consequences of launching such a project.
It just occurred to me that, in so far as the Genesis Project would be based on the actions of autonomous AI agents (albeit programmed by human beings), it isn’t “anthropic” in the narrowest sense, as human beings would not be directly responsible for the actions that the autonomous AI agent undertakes at a target exoplanet, but only responsible at one remove. What are we to call some undertaking executed by AI at the behest of human designers? Meta-anthropic? Anthropic at one remove? Pseudoanthropic? Mechanistic?
The more AI develops and builds upon its AI-specific experiences, the farther this pseudoanthropic agency will diverge from authentically anthropic agency, and this divergence of AI agency from the specifically anthropic agency of its progenitors will figure in the second thought experiment below.
Thought Experiment I
Suppose, as a thought experiment, that more than one civilization initiated a Project Genesis, and that as a result two Project Genesis AI-directed spacecraft arrived at a planetary system at about the same time (one from Earth, and another from a non-terrestrial civilization) with about the same mission, and each of these spacecraft identified a transiently habitable planet ripe for Project Genesis. Each spacecraft then begins the process of seeding this world with its own preferred life.
While the programming and the AI of these two spacecraft would be similar (we are assuming the extraterrestrial spacecraft was produced by a peer civilization and a peer species) they would not be identical, and the difference between the responses of the two spacecraft to the mission to superintend the seeding of life on a heretofore sterile but potentially habitable exoplanet could conflict or escalate in interesting ways.
The appearance on the planet below of life distinct from that seeded, after having initially determined that the planet was sterile, might be interpreted by the on-board AI as a highly unusual form of development, and depending on the protocols for how strongly the development of life should be directed, this could in turn be interpreted as scientifically interesting or as a threat to the goals of the Genesis Project.
Thought Experiment II
Suppose, as an alternative thought experiment, that the spacecraft launched from Earth to undertake the Genesis Project were not only a vehicle for terrestrial life, but were also Von Neumann machines, with an additional directive above and beyond seeding life on an exoplanet, of going on to reproduce themselves and their mission. Imagine, moreover, that the Genesis Project Von Neumann machine studies the course of the development of life that it has seeded on a target exoplanet and incorporates what it has learned from this panspermia experience into the copies of itself that it sends out to further seed terrestrial life.
Presumably, the lessons learned from growing a biosphere from scratch, possibly even from custom-tailored microbes that the spacecraft has seeded on the target exoplanet, would result in changes made to the life seeded on further target exoplanets by later generations of self-replicating Genesis Project spacecraft. The result would be a rapid evolution of life as it spreads outward, notwithstanding the fact that the targeted exoplanets are transiently habitable and therefore would allow less of an opportunity for macroevolutionary changes. In this panspermia scenario, the macroevolutionary dimension would be a function of the spacecraft, its AI and its programming, rather than those selection pressures that typically act upon planetary endemic life as speciation pumps. Here, the spacecraft are the speciation pumps.
The Two Thought Experiments in Collision
Now, given these two thought experiments, it would be possible that two spacecraft as in Thought Experiment II (immediately above) were launched from Earth in differing directions into the cosmos, and that distant descendants of these two spacecraft, having both learned from previous experiences of panspermia and having reproduced themselves in order to further disseminate terrestrial life, as updated by what they have learned in the course of their mission, might contact each other far from Earth.
Many of the conditions of Thought Experiment I could play themselves out in this case, as each spacecraft would begin with identical or highly similar programming, but altered by several cycles of panspermia and self-replication, the program for seeding life would be slightly different in each case, and the kind of life being seeded would have evolved. After a sufficient number of generations had passed, it might not even be possible to recognize that each spacecraft and the life that it carried came from the same original source. Indeed, one of these spacecraft could return to Earth and not know that it had returned to its ancestor’s point of origin.
A galaxy (or a universe) seeded with life in this way would exhibit certain features that would betray the vectors of panspermia and how they evolved as they made the circuit of the galaxy (or the universe). Such a Genesis Project would demonstrate adaptive radiation on a galactic scale, with the most successful forms of life passed along by replicating spacecraft and then being adapted for the new conditions found at any subsequent exoplanet.
Unintended Consequences of Galactic-Scale Panspermia
If the universe were to be seeded with life in this way, and life so seeded endured through the very late stages of the evolution of the cosmos, it might be possible to determine facts about the origins, development, and destiny of the cosmos from the nature of the patterns of life that it contains, much as it has become common practice to date inanimate rocks by the particular kind of fossils that are to be found in these rocks. The particular kind of life to be found in a given region of the universe might be used to determine the vicissitudes of that region of the universe as a vehicle for life.
What ought we to call a universe in which life has become so pervasive that it is found in every nook and cranny of space, much as life on Earth penetrates several kilometers into the rocks of the crust? The Bioverse? The astrostratigraphy of the bioverse would then offer another way around Krauss and Sherrer’s “end of cosmology” thesis, giving future intelligent agents an alternative way to discern the big picture of the cosmos after that big picture has receded beyond the possibility of observational cosmology.
