Digital Space CEO Bruce Damer presented on BBC World Service program “The Forum” Sunday his vision of the EvoGrid — a worldwide, cross-disciplinary effort to create a digital simulation of the chemical origins of life on Earth from complex combinations of atoms.

The concept is to model the most primitive cell by “converting a corner of the Internet into a digital primordial soup to get trillions of atoms, and then molecules,” so research chemists can “log in and start experiments.

“We’re going to do two versions of the Evogrid,” he explained. “One is a black box that doesn’t allow anyone to interface, but to look for signs of emergent complexity and pre-biotic things going on.” It will run on an evogrid@home screensaver on home PCs. The second is an “intelligent designer edition for chemists or bio-origin-of-life hackers.”

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