um.Well, I was going to use it as a basis of a story. Then I thought, what kind of society or civilization do you think would have arisen from this?
Where you start a story> from Day One? A hundred years later? Two hundred?
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The satellite had been built to carry human DNA and to regenerate the human species elsewhere using the latest cloning technologies. It would all be automated. The humans would be produced not as infants but as fourteen or fifteen year olds with the knowledge needed to survive and with enough genetic diversity for the resulting colony to survive.
It had been a small private program that was quickly forgotten once closed. The probe wandered through space for decades warping from solar system to system. Somewhere along the way it received enough radiation to slightly damage the DNA samples it carried. It had initiated a program to protect the samples but the damage had been done.
The Allegra Probe finally detected a world and scans showed it to be enough like Earth to be a good prospect for colonization. Other scans detected no artificial satellites in orbit, no artificial light when the world below was dark and no radio waves or other signals that intelligent life already existed.
The probe found a suitable location near the equator where there were lakes and rivers, where life should have a chance. The probe changed its orbit and set a descent path into the data stream and then finally disconnected from the warp drive that would burn up in the atmosphere later.
The next two minutes of entry were the most dangerous for the probe and its payload. The friction from re-entry burned the ablative shielding. Had the probe misjudged the planets’ gravity? Was the descent path going to cause it to crash into a mountain or an ocean? A million things could have gone wrong.
Everything went perfectly, even better than the long-dead designer could have hoped. The probe came to rest on the bank of a small river. Thus it was able to use the soil and water as well as the air to extract the matter that was required to fulfill its mission. It ordered the two birthing chambers into action and over the next 24 hours it grew two humans. The computer activated the device that imparted knowledge loaded directly into the brain.
These humans would be born with the knowledge and even skills to survive and the ability to learn and adapt. Above all the humans would have an unquenchable imperative to procreate and to settle all the lands of the world. Thus the planet was seeded with humanity, or at least a version of it.
The damage done to the Allegra Probe was slight but it was enough. The humans it created were sterile and the part of the intelligence given to the new humans was incomplete. These humans would have to invent their own moral code and their own version of civilization.
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