Monday, December 01, 2014

[hadniaqr] Directed panspermia

Assume life will generally not form on its own (despite abiogenesis results).  Suppose one wishes to seed an entire galaxy with life, scattering the necessary ingredients everywhere.  Probably organic molecules the precursors of life, not needing to seed with anything so complicated as bacteria.  Evolution will take it the rest of the way, adapting life to the various environments that can support it.

How would one engineer a method to scatter material as widely as a galaxy?  How can one avoid the scattering mechanism from destroying the material?  Supernovae and energetic stellar winds (e.g., Wolf Rayet) seem the best candidates for propulsion, but they are dangerous.  Micrometeoroid dust can easily get pushed by stellar winds, but they also might get destroyed in atmospheric entry.  The cores of larger meteorites and comets could survive, but creating enough of those to seed a galaxy is a tremendous amount of material.  As a wild guess of how much material might be needed, how would one create a few solar masses of RNA?  (Though not necessarily all at once.)

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