Cooking Up Creation in a Computer


The power of computer processing could one day solve the riddle of life’s origin.


Still image from EvoGrid the Movie, showing the ‘equipment’ that would simulate organisms in a digital primordial soup, and then turn them into real creatures using chemistry and a nano-fabricator.
Image Credit: DigitalSpace


Each virtual particle within the Evogrid’s simulated liquid soup will have particular physical properties, and will behave accordingly.

“We will be constructing a model of a ‘toy universe’, which has approximate properties of the early oceans on Earth,” says Damer.


Self-organization leading to the formation of an artificial vesicle, as represented in EvoGrid the Movie.
Image Credit: DigitalSpace



“If a vesicle, or a ball of particles has formed, you would be able to detect that,” says Damer.  “If a string of particles began to replicate, that would be easy to track, or if particles began to combine in a long chain of reactions, that would be important but tougher to recognize.”



“Nils Baricelli wrote an artificial life program for the first modern computer in 1953, and to some extent we haven’t gone much further than his original experiment,” says Damer.  “We shall see how far the EvoGrid can go, using millions of the descendents of the original Von Neumann machine.”

Increasing complexity leads to the development of a primitive artificial organism.
Image credit: DigitalSpace

Damer envisions two possible versions of Evogrid: a hands-off “Origins” version, and an experimental “Intelligent Designer” edition that would allow people to tinker with the simulation.  Damer says the ID edition of Evogrid could include a “miracle module” that would allow users to play God in their attempts to create proto-life. The Origins edition would be the focus of the science, however, with strict controls to shield the experiment from any guiding human influence.

Damer muses that “in its ultimate incarnation, a much more powerful EvoGrid would allow us to pose the question: where in this universe or others might life exist and at what level of complexity?”  Damer thinks an EvoGrid tuned for SETI and astrobiology could be used to simulate extraterrestrial environments and address the question of whether life could have emerged there. 

Even if the EvoGrid managed to generate some virtual but convincing life forms, either through random or directed means, “the numbers will always be numbers,” says Damer.  “As Baricelli wrote over fifty years ago, they will never be living organisms.”

But Damer dreams big, and he thinks someday the creatures generated by the Evogrid could be re-created chemically.  A virtual scanner could be devised to break down the computer-based creature into its digital body parts, and then that information could be used to try to build the same creature out of real chemistry in the lab.  Of course, this step of the experiment would rely on technology that does not currently exist.   “Life is more than the sum of its parts, and you can’t just throw the necessary chemicals together and expect a life form to emerge,” Damer says.  However, researchers are hard at work trying to recreate all the biochemical steps necessary to synthesize a kind of proto-life in the lab, so perhaps this possibility is not too far over the horizon.

Simulated organisms before they are digitally scanned, chemically fabricated, and sent on a rocket journey to an asteroid. From EvoGrid: The Asteroid Eaters.
Image Credit: DigitalSpace

Looking even farther into the future, Damer thinks that far more advanced EvoGrids, paired with “ChemoGrids”, could be used to create a new genesis of cyber-physical life forms to colonize asteroids, or to terraform Mars into a more habitable planet for humans. Freeman Dyson popularized this concept of space colonization, and Damer notes that “evolution within an adaptively-tuned living system is the only mechanism powerful enough to make a place outside of the Earth habitable for us.”

He expects that other intelligent civilizations in the universe probably harness the power of evolution to solve difficult problems such as creating habitable zones to colonize.  “This is a common theme in science fiction, but science fiction tells us what could be possible someday,” he adds.  “The way for us to get there is to start with simulation and ride the wave of ever greater computing power.”