Your Screen Saver Could Help Create New Life
Software designed to detect life in outer space is now being repurposed to look for signs of artificial life developing in complex computer systems on Earth In the beginning, there were organic molecules. And they were good, but unorganized. Then, those organic molecules formed proteins, and evolution kicked in and started a three-billion-year journey culminating in you and me. But the question of just how life made the jump from inert organic chemicals to the complex building blocks of life has vexed scientists for years. A company hopes that software originally designed to find extraterrestrial life will now help them unlock the origin of life on this planet. The company, EvoGrid, has built on the historic distributed computing program SETI@Home, creating a program that harnesses unused computing power to simulate the random, emergent patterns of complexity that stewarded the jump from organic compounds to...