The line between life and not-life

Martin Hanczyc of the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) in Denmark, shows off protocells – simple chemical blobs that display life-like behavior – in his TED talk. The protocells move around, feed on energy, dance with each other, merge, split up again and very much resemble digital artificial life environments. I am looking forward to a point where wetware labs become more and more common in the art-tech scene, and coders get their hands dirty with chemicals and primordial goo.

Three characteristics we look for to recognize life out there: the system needs to be in non-equilibrium, needs to be in a liquid form, and has to be able to make and break chemical bonds.

This entry was posted in Stream.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>