Building a planet favorable to the evolution of intelligent life

You are a planetary engineer from a lonely species fairly high on the Kardashev scale. Although your species has wandered throughout the galaxy seeking out new life and civilizations for thousands of years, you have discovered that although life can be found on almost any planet with liquid water, intelligent life is extremely rare, often taking several billion years after a planet's formation to develop by lucky accident, when it develops at all, and prone to going extinct long before you get a chance to find it.

Your mission is to design a planet (or several) that specifically favors the evolution of intelligence. After creating the planet, and allowing it to cool off and develop single-celled life, you will go on a long journey at near-light speeds for a billion years or so. When you return, you want there to be a fairly good chance of finding an intelligent species (or several!) living there - even if one intelligent species goes extinct, you want the planet to be so favorable toward the development of intelligent life that it is likely to appear multiple times, improving the chance of finding one waiting for you.

You do not want to contaminate the planet with the specific values of your own civilization (you are looking for a friendly alien species, not an engineered child-species) so you will not use robots or any intelligent machines to guide their evolution. You should also make the planet look as natural as possible, so that the intelligent life that develops doesn't realize their planet was engineered - no obvious puzzles, monoliths, or mechanical subterranean engines lying around, unless they are something that could reasonably be expected to appear naturally. Beyond that, you can do whatever you want with the planet's size, composition, atmosphere, rotation, (natural) satellites, or position in space.

posted almost 8 years ago

IndigoFenix‭

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