Plant Seeds and Starships
For anyone who wants to see a genuine miracle, pop open a plant seed.
The amazing thing about life is that it’s a form of matter that replicates itself. Each seed contains all the information and mechanics it needs to accomplish this.
And you can hold it in your hand. It’s a portable miracle. You can even eat them.
Seeds have always fascinated me, and they’re now serving as the basis of a novel manuscript I’m writing. One of the most important endeavors humanity must work on is to develop the technology to replicate a seed, and encode everything needed to grow a whole world inside it.
It is possible. It can be done. And it’s far more feasible than trying to send a starship full of living people (frozen or otherwise) on a journey lasting thousands of years.
Just send a seed. Send a lot of them – small, compact, self-controlled, self-replicating, self-healing, and able to last for millions of years. Scatter them across the galaxy. If any of them succeed, they will send more, and each one will build a whole world full of Earth life. They would be, literally, Earth’s own seeds.
I truly believe this is the only way Humanity is going to spread to the stars.
Here’s the very premature teaser that popped into my head for this current manuscript:
A million years in the future.
Ten different worlds.
Ten different people.
The same DNA.