June 14, 2026 — Even if someday we might fly interstellar ferries, wouldn't it be orders of magnitude easier to send probes carrying microorganisms to "life bomb" other stellar systems?

If it's a quadrillion times easier to send a life bomb than ferry humans, then it would still be a thousand times easier to send a trillion life bombs.

You might say that life bombing would also be hard tech to make work reliably. But it seems to me that would still be six or so orders of magnitude easier than interstellar travel, and so far more likely to happen first.

And so, wouldn't it be very likely we'll try something like that in the future?

Why would we want to seed other planets like that - what would be the benefit? There are some who might make an economic argument, that right now those are idle rocks of matter and by jump starting life eventually they'll evolve into productive trading colonies. But the reason it might happen could even just be out of curiosity or boredom. Some people keep ant farms, or garden, or climb Mount Everest, just because.

Even if 99.9% of people didn't care to send life bombs, if technology becomes good enough, all it would take is one group to life bomb the galaxy.

Interstellar travel is more work and more risk than life bombing, for potentially even less benefit, that even if we travel interstellar we will surely life bomb first.

It seems like it one of these three is bound to happen: technological progress halts, we enter a totalitarian state that can prevent life bombing, or we life bomb.

It seems extremely unlikely that humans would have the tools to visit other worlds ourselves before those worlds have been life bombed.

So then the next question is whether or not our own planet was life bombed?

Did our first cellular organisms spontaneously evolve here or were they life bombed by an alien interstellar probe?

What are the odds life springs up on a planet before another planet has life bombed it? How do we answer a question like that?

One angle of attack is to first come up with a useful definition of life. What immediately comes to mind is the work of @Sara_Imari and @leecronin on Assembly Theory. Using their work we might be able to come up with how likely life is to spontaneously arise from physical laws.

Life sprung up spontaneously at least once, is that common or rare? If it's rare, then most instances of planetary life probably came from life bombs.

But let's just assume life here on earth came from a life bomb. What might have been in that bomb? A single species of single cell organisms? Precursors to the cell? Perhaps some multicellular organisms? A breeding set of each (maybe the Noah's Ark story is about life bombs)? Would there have been machinery to 3D print life most suitable to the physical dynamics of this planet?

Would the ideal life bomb only contain the ingredients necessary for the earliest phase of life, or would it also contain tools and knowledge to help later generations advance?

Perhaps you'd have the life bomb split like a Mirv, and plant pieces of itself throughout the system like a scavenger hunt - where each stage can only be found once the life has evolved to a certain technological level.

Have we scoured the earth and moon and solar system for pieces of old life bombs? Maybe we have and have found them, and it's just way above my pay grade. If we had an open information society, without information control or classified information, we could rule that out. But given that we don't, it's hard to rule out.

If life bombs did hit earth, and it seems a likely possibility, then there's potentially a whole different explanation of human history, where what's really going on is that the people in charge are the ones that stumbled upon the life bomb remnants first.

Lots of stories come to mind when thinking about life bombs. In addition to Noah's ark, IIRC the movie Prometheus is about this, and also the Indiana Jones series could have been a story about regimes racing to find pieces of old life bombs (which would truly be magic, like the religious artifacts in the movie).

When I think about space, and how hard it is for humans to survive there, it seems logical to conclude that far before we start living out there we'll be firing off life bombs, and then there's perhaps a strong likelihood that there are life bombs already on there way here (if not here already).

To force myself to think, I waited until after pushing this to use AI to find out what the best thinking was on it, since I'm confident nothing here is original (other than maybe the catchy title, which I like). The term of art is Directed panspermia.