Microbes Devise Superior Evolutionary Strategy
One of the prerequisites for us humans to achieve interstellar travel is faster spaceships.
But what if we could do the opposite: what if instead we could evolve as slower people?
Imagine us with million year lifespans. Imagine if we lived on a geologic timescale.
If we could live a million years, then travel to a star 60,000 light years away would have all the traveltime investment of a bus trip cross town. Compared to us, a butterfly doesn't seem to get much done in it's tiny two week span. Imagine how much more we would achieve as a species if we could live a million years. For one thing, locating and colonizing other planets looks a lot easier. So it is exciting news that scientists have found a new life form that looks to be working on exactly this evolutionary feat: learning to live for millions of years.
No doubt this is to make sure that theres a more feasible exit strategy when they evolve to our level and need 5 more planets for all the stuff they make, like we do. This new lifeform is just a speck of stuff right now, living under the sea floor, but hey, where was your big fancy SUV a billion years ago? You too evolved from a tiny speck of stuff like these newly discovered lifeforms.
ScienceDaily (July 22, 2008)
Tiny microbes beneath the sea floor, distinct from life on the Earth's surface, may account for one-tenth of the Earth's living biomass, according to an interdisciplinary team of researchers, but many of these minute creatures are living on a geologic timescale.
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