Bruce Damer's talk at the CONTACT2012 conference (March 30, 2012)

The EvoGrid and ChemoGrid:
Genesis Engines
Driving toward a New Origin of Life
Bruce Damer, DigitalSpace and Biota.org

CONTACT 2012-SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA
03 30 2012

ET
How many (if any) are out there?
How many are on the move?
How did they figure out how to do that?
And can we do the same?

The Drake Equation (for ETs of the “I Love Lucy” detectable kind)

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication
might be possible;

and

R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star
that has planets
fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some
point
fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases
detectable signs of their existence into space
L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into
space.[2]

Damer’s extensions to the Drake Equation
(for ETs of the “boldly go where no ET has gone before” kind)

where:
N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy which got up the gumption
to boldly go out and find the others (ie: In Real Life);

and
fv = the fraction of civilizations who sport “visionary geeks”, wacky
individuals or collectives not solely committed to mundane productivity
but instead hooked on this “boldly go” escapade
f$ = the fraction of those civilizations whose visionary geeks are not only
out of the closet but able to get funding support
f(t+n) = the fraction of those civilizations who are willing to fund
visionary geeks for indeterminately long periods of time
fT = the fraction of the above civilizations that are willing to pay for large
scale versions of the geeks’ products for a very long time
fm = the fraction of the above that are able to remember what it was all
about and handle the end results (or lack of them) in a “mature” way (ie:
not killing off all the visionary geeks and burning the fleet)

So how do these ET visionary geeks accomplish the
Boldly Go Thing?

I postulate that it can and must be done in these seven easy steps…

They have to understand the concept of abstraction (math) as all
good geeks do and that they have to learn how to adapt their brains
and/or build machines to render these abstractions into a simulation
(computing conceptual worlds at many scales)

They have to have acquired understanding of their own evolution
and that ET civilization and innovation can be vastly advanced over
mere tinker-toy fiddling by tapping the power of evolution

They have to then marry the mechanisms of evolution with the tool
of simulation and play around with primordial soups for a while,
proving they can make this work before their grants run out

They then have to decide to apply this magic combination to the
challenge of evolving a viable biota (bio-plasmic or machine or both)
to take them or their replacements out into the universe

They obviously have to have a good working knowledge of the bits
of the universe where they expect to send their “Bio-Universal-
Machine” (BUM) selves

Time to put it all together for our visionary geek ETs: get your BUMs
in simulated gear, fabricate them in atoms and dispatch them to boldly
go forth and multiply

Some (not small) time later… in a parking orbit above Earth, the
ETs honk and wave “yo down there, got anyone crazy enough to be
working on what we just did, if so, send em up!”

And our visionary geek ETs will have answered the key
question of the Universe:
Are there are other BUMs like us out there?

Now back to SETI
which is…

=

In that the EvoGrid first creates the haystack
(an origin of life simulation)
then hopes that a needle
spontaneously appears in it…

…and that the needle is found!

But is this realistic?
Freeman Dyson: “the simulation
should be truly ‘messy’, ie: nature is
not clean and neat as you are showing
in the movie, cells are more like dirty
water surrounded by garbage bags”

-Professor, Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJNJ

Chemically Recreating the Origins of Life:
Miller-Urey, 1953

Radically new chemical life cycles

Your chemical origins of life computing equipment

But how easy is this going to be?

Penny Boston: “The simulation
must model abstract universes and
not attempt a high fidelity
chemistry model, all that counts is
if you can demonstrate a method
for supporting ever increasing
levels of emergent complexity”

-Associate Professor of Cave and Karst Science
Director, Cave and Karst Studies
Dept of Earth & Environmental Science
New Mexico Tech, Socorro, NM

Boston: “You need this…. to originate and evolve
complex life (and civilization)”

How do we get…

From here… to here?

Protocells must form on their own through
successive “ratchets” of complexity

Ref Pierre-Alain Monnard, FLinT

So how to map this computer onto this one?

The EvoGrid: a large central artificial chemistry
simulation operated upon by analysis clients

The Challenge of Computational Origins of Life Endeavours

Historical antecedents informing the challenge and design of the digital
simulation of evolution: Barricelli’s numerical symbioorganisms
(Barricelli, 1953).

EvoGrid Optimization

Concept of Search
(fitness function)
implementing a
Stochastic hill-climbing
algorithm utilizing
analysis, feedback and
temporal backtracking

Hardware configuration for EvoGrid, first and second small
grids: DigiBarn (2010) and U.C. San Diego (2011)

Grid1: 2 months operation
(4 cores average)
Grid2: approx 5 months operation
(15-30 cores, distribution of
daemons)

The EvoGrid First Prototype Experiments and Analysis
(teleological end goals)

Meta-experiment:
Lots of molecules
(directed search)

Meta-experiment:
Large molecules
(directed search)

Sample results by “molecular” products

Experiment #1 (max=60) Experiment #6 (max=141)

WebGL 3D viewer depicting snapshot of simulations with current virtual
molecular products (yields).

Comparison of key experiments and analysis

Experiment #1: plateau maximum of 60 molecules
Experiment #6: surmounts serial maxima, eventual plateau at 141 molecules
(189 at termination of experiment)

Conclusion of EvoGrid Experiments and
Next Steps: the ChemoGrid

• Stochastic Hill Climbing through the simulation of dissipative
systems (molecules) can be used to traverse vectors to
higher complexity more rapidly toward teleological end
goals
• Computers are decades from having the capacity to
simulate chemical volumes in large enough numbers or for
long enough times to carry out qualified origin of life
experiments

• Next Steps: The ChemoGrid, using chemicals to simulate
themselves in a hybrid between combinatorial chemistry
and computer and robotically driven search and selection
and reseeding of small volume chemical experiments

ChemoGrid Concept “Genesis Engine” (physical)

ChemoGrid Prototype (Damer, Summer 2011)

Production ChemoGrid (Deamer-UC Santa Cruz)

The power of (primordial) soups!

PhD Thesis!

Completed after 25 years of on and off work
University College Dublin, 2011

Book derived from Thesis!

Damer, Seckbach and Gordon, eds. (2013)
Actively seeking contributing authors

Back to ET
Brewing up aliens in the EvoGrid, but are they alien?
EvoGrid as a new kind of SETI telescope: where in
the universe might life arise, and what kind?
Or… what alternative universes (physics) would be
conducive to life (is there a continuum?)
Would the EvoGrid be our means to communicate
with ET? A signal lock? If we talk to them via adaptive
virtual creatures will they spare us the bulldozers
building the intergalactic bypass?
If we build the EvoGrid out of quantum computers will
we be able to control the critters’ spread, turn on the
universe?

Ode to a Genesis Engine
Oh Genesis Engine, you great Rube Goldberg machine of the
21st Century, resplendent with all your pumps piping chemical
soups around, your computer eyes scanning for signs of
competing lines of polymer-infused vesicles, and your purring
grids of silicon modeling yields then selecting experiments to be
robotically re-seeded. And inside of you one day, perhaps
decades hence, an alarm will sound in one lone experiment
within your millions of distributed ChemoGrids. A sample will be
rushed for analysis and scientists will emerge breathlessly
declaring that a second genesis has occurred, or rather is in the
course of occurring if time (and budgets) permitted running you
for another thousand years. You will leave us all wondering
what it all means, but it will mark a major moment for our
species, as powerful as when our Earth was first photographed
from space, for thanks to you we will know that we are most
certainly not alone in the Universe, and in some sense, we will
have made CONTACT.

Acknowledgements and Resources

• DigitalSpace EvoGrid Team: www.evogrid.org
• NASA Ames Research Center and other NASA
Centers and contractor colleagues
• UC San Diego Calit2
• University College Dublin/SMARTLab
• Elixir Technologies Corporation
• Getting in touch: Bruce@Damer.com

Bruce Damer's talk at the CONTACT2012 conference (March 30, 2012)

Recomendados

Recomendados

Mais conteúdo relacionado

Semelhante a Bruce Damer's talk at the CONTACT2012 conference (March 30, 2012)

Semelhante a Bruce Damer's talk at the CONTACT2012 conference (March 30, 2012) (20)

Mais de Bruce Damer

Mais de Bruce Damer (19)

Último

Último (20)

Bruce Damer's talk at the CONTACT2012 conference (March 30, 2012)