Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Target shooting? The Genesis Project is declared as a new venue for interstellar missions and for the unfolding of life in our galactic surroundings.
Credit: NASA/Kepler Mission

Several thousand planets outside our solar system have been found – but why not seed a candidate world with microbial life forms dispatched from Earth.

That’s on the mind of Claudius Gros of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. An interstellar mission loaded with bacteria and unicellular eukaryotes alike, a bio payload that characterized Earth prior to what’s called the “Cambrian Explosion.” That is, around 530 million years ago, a wide variety of animals burst onto the evolutionary scene.

Robotic microcraft

Gros dubs it the “Genesis project” – robotic microcraft equipped with an on-board gene laboratory for the in situ synthesis of the microbes. But how best to actually prove that a world is uninhabited and is a clear choice for being on the receiving end of the Genesis project?

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Claudius Gros of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Goethe University.
Credit: Claudius Gros

That final decision to go ahead must be taken autonomously by the microcraft’s on-board artificial intelligence. “This may seem an imprudent strategy nowadays, but possibly not so in a few decades,” Gros writes in an essay published in the journal, Astrophysics and Space Science.

Transiently habitable worlds

“Our galaxy is expected in particular to teem with planets which are in part habitable, but for which the clement conditions do not last long enough for higher life forms to evolve on their own,” Gros explains.

A directed energy spacecraft could be launched and then slowed by magnetic sails at targeted, “transiently habitable” worlds.

“We hence believe that the Genesis project opens a new venue for interstellar missions and for the unfolding of life in our galactic surroundings,” Gros concludes.

Read his essay, Developing Ecospheres on Transiently Habitable Planets:

The Genesis Project at:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.06087v2.pdf