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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

It'll be easier to send a DNA without a life-form. A life-form is very expensive (need to eat and breath) and not necessarily adaptable to earth conditions.

A very well encapsulated and protected DNA will land on earth and create the most adaptable life-form there through mutation and competition. All of these life-forms have the trait of wanting to pass their genes, multiply as much as possible and then spread around.

So the engineers probably had that in mind:

1- Extremely small: Probably so that they can propel it through space at very high speed + propel lots of it.

2- No maintenance required.

3- Will create a life-form if possible that is adaptable to the target country.

4- The life-form has the property of multiplication, and spreading.

5- The new superior life-form will propel more of these DNA.

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> A very well encapsulated and protected DNA will land on earth and create the most adaptable life-form there through mutation and competition.

No, it won't. DNA alone without cellular machinery (that is, without a “life form”) doesn't produce anything. That's why viruses need hosts.

>A life-form is very expensive (need to eat and breath)

Not necessarily, many organisms can undergo cryptobiosis, where all metabolic activity ceases, and then restarts when conditions are appropriate (sometimes decades later).

Fungi & bacteria can turn into spores & travel through space. There was also recent article about fungus growing on the outside (!) of the space station.

There are also things like tardigrades [1] which are pretty much the epoch of survival evolution. And this is all just stuff on our little planet. It's hard to say anything about life on a large scale, since we are basing everything we know on a sample of one. But it's probably safe to say that we have not even scratched the surface of what's possibility through just plain old evolution alone.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade

There are still a few billion years left for earth to shine.

> There are also things like tardigrades [1] which are pretty much the epoch of survival evolution

“the epoch”? Apex, maybe?

Nematode worms have been brought back to life after having been frozen in tundra for 40,000 years.

> It'll be easier to send a DNA without a life-form.

DNA is useless without the cellular machinery to translate it into proteins and new cells. To do that, you basically need cells.

Would a virus meet this project's specifications?

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