To Seed Or Not To Seed...

Having decided on a civilization having reached a level 1 status and striving for a level 2 for  the novel, PLANET, places the setting for my novel well into the future (as much as a 1000 years), but I think any less of a future technological capability by humans would make our plot untenable. Humans have to be capable of saving themselves to make it work. Anything less would be disastrous for a hard sci-fi tale!

How to populate our new Twin Earth? First we have to “seed” it. My inhabitants of PLANET are scrambling to evacuate their home planet on a great Diaspora just behind an army of unleashed von Neumann probes, those self-replicating robots that are “seeding” the galaxy with terraform, which is, changing the new chosen planet’s surface and climate to be like Earths.

Researching von Neumann probes was an intriguing journey. These amazing machines would be able to move over interstellar or interplanetary distances and to utilize local materials to build new copies of itself. What a wonderful development for the purposes of our story! The best part of living at this time in history is that so many things are being imagined and placed at our fingertips. What do you think, is this a great time in history to be alive or not?