Hold me.

Igor! Igor! Fire up ze dyno-mometer!!

Not looking for ‘God,’ necessarily. Instead, imagine we’re the product of some kind of deliberate panspermia, with Arecibo-style blueprints for something like faster-than-light travel or a Dyson sphere CONTAINED in us.   

If the Earth was going to end, and humans wanted to let a new world have a crack at it, but hadn’t yet mastered space travel, we could use life itself as a time capsule containing all human knowledge. Encode a bunch of tardigrades with everything from Shakespeare to the Manhattan project, then ‘hitchhike’ a few thousand on the backs of every near-passing comet.

Or let’s say you’re a Type II or III Kardashev-scale civilization from Alpha Centauri, and you discover, conclusively, that FTL is impossible. The most efficient way to ‘colonize’ a galaxy, then, might be to send self-unpacking life spinning off on comets/meteoresquerie to all the closest goldilocks zones.

The ‘data’ encoded in the life could be as simple as a star coordinate, so us ‘colonists’ would know where to phone home, or where to look for instructions. This would have the additional benefit of halving communication delays (the same reason robotic probes are advanced as a possibility for interstellar comm).

It’s at least arguable that the self-preserving nature of dna leads INEXORABLY to natural selection, and so, to sentience. But the raison d’etre of dna itself is opaque. Just like a virus, dna has no natural REASON to exist other than its own self-replication, but that still begs the question. Maybe the seeming arbitrariness and unlikelihood of a rock pocked with volcanoes birthing humans is MEANT to attract our attention. Not as proof of God’s love, but as the volcanic glass that “has no earthly business in a Maine hayfield.” Maybe it’s our Macguffin.

Now, the DNA ‘data’ would have to stick with the organisms through thick and thin, all the way from tardigrades up to homo sapiens. But wouldn’t you know it – we have that!!!!!!!!

MITOCHONDRIAL DNA – still kicking around in humans and eukaryotes alike – is as old as life on Earth.

I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath…..it gets even better….

It has been suggested that Mitochondrial DNA is the cause of (and so, related to the cure for) AGING.

http://pliki.supernova.com.pl/CELLFOOD/BADANIA/THE_MITOCHONDRIAL_FREE_RADICAL_THEORY_OF_AGING.pdf

I expect a first draft on my desk by Friday.

(Back in the day, some mainframes used to spend up to a third of their hardware continuously checking the other two-thirds, correcting errors where possible, and ensuring that they were reported in a way that let them be easily corrected even when the error was intermittent. These days, you folks won’t even deign to pay for parity bits … yes, memory is more reliable than it was, but a lot of this is that MS has convinced you that machines are supposed to malfunction.)

Or not.