Guest speaker: Bruce Damer

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Bruce Damer.]

"The EvoGrid at home will be your computer looking for signs of emergent protolife in the primordial digital soup."

"[Life-like digital processes] are significant because they show us an insight into our own beginnings. They challenge religious beliefs, creationists' beliefs, they show us that life may have emerged elsewhere in the universe in different environments. They will be, in a sense, one of the ultimate creations of the biosphere."

"Perhaps Gaia, the biosphere, has a devious plan which is to allow one of its species, one of its offspring, to create a mechanism to create new forms of life."

"The crescendo of human civilization really is going to be in people's minds more than on the streets. It'll be in the minds first."

"The giving response that we have [when natural disasters occur], and through technology the fact that we can sort of be there virtually, and be in the environment that those people are in, and the crisis they're in, the empathic response coming out of support is perhaps the healthiest thing that you see in the modern world when there's a disaster."

"Not only is no one running the world, but it probably isn't possible for anyone to run the world. And once we come to that realization we become human again because we'll say, 'Look everyone's human. Everyone is trying their best. Everyone is going from crisis to crisis, and we'll stop believing in those conspiracy theories, which I also think will be a healthy thing."

"So in a sense, it'll be the geeks that inherit the Earth, but it'll be enlightened geeks we hope."

"We are a maintenance-heavy, hand-built civilization."

"When you finally realize that the system is shaking underneath, reach for somebody and look them in the eye, and therein you will find your rescue."

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Bruce Damer Online

Bruce Damer's DigiBarn Computer Museum

Bruce Damer on the BBC Forum

The Planetary Mood Ring Project