Today is my twentieth birthday and its been a great two decades so far for me with many more to come. Yesterday, SpaceX historically landed the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket in a big step towards rocket reusability and so, access to space.
Stage one has landed
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 22, 2015
This is probably one of the best birthday presents I could have gotten and I am so happy SpaceX has been able to achieve this.
Changing topics, I've had two decades now to decide what I will be doing with my life and I've known early on that I wanted to do something big that changed the world (or universe) for the better in a substantial way. I'm not talking about menial change, but instead change that affects millions or billions for the better; something that advances the human race as a whole. This leads someone into asking 'What is the greatest good one can do or pursue?' I think about this a lot and the answer I have personally come up with at least so far in my life is that life itself is inherently good and so preserving and spreading life is 'the greatest good.' Although I thought of this myself, the idea of this has been thought of before by others and is actually established. The idea that life itself is valuable is called Biotic Ethics. Once you establish Biotic Ethics the way to apply this as a second step came naturally to me, to preserve life and spread it, we must branch out into space and have life on multiple planets. Obviously, it's not good to have all of your eggs in one basket should an extinction event occur (meteors and dinosaurs). Luckily, someone is working on this who isn't a fringe scientist, the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, who is aiming to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars, which is excellent. During my lifetime I will probably see a Mars colony, but I think it is important for life as a whole, not humans, to expand farther than that, which brings me to Directed Panspermia, which is the "deliberate transport of microorganisms in space to be used as introduced species on lifeless planets" (Wikipedia). You can imagine this playing out as interstellar missions to other solar systems of interest that have potentially habitable planets, then bombing those planets with very simple microorganisms that are robust enough to sustain themselves there and allow them to evolve in whichever way the future takes them. The important part is that we are seeding the universe with life. This is what I am dedicating my life to. I think that defining a goal and then working towards it greatly increases the chances of success of that goal and so with this blog post, 20 years into my life, I'm defining my life's goal to achieve directed panspermia, or put simpler, to protect life by spreading it throughout the universe. Should this occur, it might be the largest thing anyone has ever done and might be one of the hardest, so I am defining this goal early in my life so that the execution of this idea can take up to 60 years. I have a few ideas on how to do this, but the point of this post is to announce the goal so anyone can know, but also to be able to hold myself accountable should I not work toward this. The first step, at least I've thought so far, is to become financially independent so that I can dedicate myself to this, and so that is what I am working on now.