DrBruce’s Genesis Engines talk delivered at Burning Man on August 30, 2012 as part of the Palenque Norte Speaker Series. Credits: Chris Aman (edit) Kianna Alarid Cameron/Svamps (music). Get voice-only version here.  [released: Dec 31, 2012]. 

Sketches of the flows and features of a first "garage lab" Genesis Engine, dreamed by DrBruce sitting on a park bench in Montpelier France, July 2012

Bruce Damer presenting the EvoGrid, predecessor to Genesis Engines, in London, UK, Feb 2009

The EvoGrid, predecessor to Genesis Engines, is described in the book chapter: CYBERBIOGENESIS AND THE EVOGRID a 21ST CENTURY GRAND CHALLENGE (Springer, 2012)

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.

Gaia, if she is being and mind, is becoming aware that the planet is dying. She created us to be the ladder to the solar system, but she made the monkey manic in the mean time. The trick now is to make contact and make the compact.

Some more resources and links on the Genesis Engines project

The EvoGrid Project Web Site. Stuart Kauffman’s talk at Tartu University “From Physics to Semiotics” (April 2012)

EvoGrid the Movie

EvoGrid the Movie, a whimsical view of a hypothetical evolution machine (Dec 2008). If unavailable, play and download here.

Conceptual design of the Chemogrid, the first Genesis Engine.

Shots of Dr. Bruce at Burning Man 2012, thanks Francis Shepherd!