First this blog post was inspired by this video by Isaac Arthur:
Like myself, the content producer on Youtube puts an emphasis on Futurism. The concept in the video is a called a Million Year Ark.
Upon watching the video and connecting the dots about what I know about life on earth I came to realize that many species on earth have worked symbiotically to encourage and maintain the existence of life on earth. For example without the atmosphere the planet earth would have ended up like mars. The magnetosphere and the fact that there is air to breath seems to be seems to be the result of cyanobacteria.
Blue green algae is primarily responsible for allowing for an atmosphere. By doing this it allowed for us to exist. The Great Oxidation Event allowed for multicellular organisms to evolve.
More generalized, plants have provided a great service to our species. They continuously provide us with oxygen and they provide us with food. Do we owe a debt to these plants?
Consider that we now have a project to sequence the genomes of 1.5 million species?
When it is time to consider building a million year ark or to terraform another planet or to just launch a probe with a digital recording of the information necessary to reconstruct chemically the life on a new planet which lifeforms shall be included? Should we include only the lifeforms which have been most useful on the earth or should we include as many lifeforms as possible for biodiversity?
If the atmosphere is so important and the plant life put so much time into creating it then why is our species so quick to damage it? Does our species have to respect what other species have built when what those species have built indirectly protects entire ecosystems of life?
What is the morality of spreading life cosmically? Is it something we have to do because we are the only species on earth seemingly capable of doing it or does it not matter?
The concept of interspecies debt would imply that we owe the species which helped to preserve life on earth. By spreading life cosmically we would in essence be doing the same for them that they did for us billions of years ago.