Random musing for today. Imagine this: we just discovered a distant planet that contains life. A primitive form of life, nothing close to the level of complexity we have here on Earth. But life nonetheless.

We observe this life from afar for thousands of years. Millions of years even. We watch it evolve slowly… single-celled organisms, multi-celled, something like plants, fungi, animals, maybe something like fish, birds, reptiles, mammals. We’re learning a ton about ourselves, about life, complexity and consciousness by watching it develop elsewhere.

But the speed of evolution is sloooow. It dawns on us that if we ever want to see a form of consciousness of comparable complexity to humans it’s going to take a really long time, maybe an infinitely long time because the probability of it evolving is so low.

So the global council makes a decision. We need to intervene and speed up this evolutionary process. We need to help consciousness develop faster.

As a species we’ve already mastered viral technology. We can create viruses that modify DNA in precise ways, generating any sequence we desire. So we create a virus that modifies its target with the core elements of our human DNA, the baseline genes for what it means to be a conscious Homo Sapien. We shoot that virus out into space, into this planet. It infects the lifeforms, targeting something close to primates in particular because they seem to be the most complex and closest to developing human-level consciousness.

The primates suddenly and very rapidly evolve. There’s a giant leap, a discontinuity, and we now have conscious humanoids living on another planet.

We’ve succeeded in creating more consciousness in the universe. Why? The universe is in a process of “waking up”, of knowing itself. We want to maximally evolve consciousness so we can win this game and move on to the next one.

Could such DNA from space have landed here on Earth 7 million years ago?