EvoGrid: Modeling evolution
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This is about how scientists imagine the conditions of the origin of life. And what was it really like? If it is impossible to go back to the past, only experimental verification remains. Just don't want to wait millions of years before multicellular creatures appear in a test tube.
Different variations of experiments on the creation of "life" (or complex organic molecules) from inorganic mixtures have been carried out repeatedly by scientists. But from the first biopolymers to DNA, lipids, cells, and from cells to multicellular organisms, there is a huge distance. It's hard to imagine that someone is able to go all this way in the laboratory - nature has spent eons on such an evolution.
But you can try to reproduce prebiotic and biological evolution in a computer. However, in order to achieve the correct result, enormous computing power is needed. But traveling "from the bottom up" from the simple (modeling molecules by the piece) to the complex – the spontaneous appearance of living systems, it is possible to prove the validity of existing views on the origin of life on our planet.
This is what the EvoGrid (Evolution Technology Grid) project is currently doing – a giant simulator of the young Earth being created in the USA.
The project leader and the main author of the idea is researcher and entrepreneur Bruce Damer. He is known to us as the head of DigitalSpace, a company engaged in three–dimensional modeling of space technology at the request of various industry firms, as well as by order of NASA.
But Bruce's interests extend far beyond space technology. Back in 1996, he created the organization Biota.org , coordinating the efforts of many engineers and scientists engaged in the search for answers to the questions – how did life appear, is it possible to create artificial life and what might life on other planets look like?
Now, with the assistance of the participants Biota.org members of the international Grey Thumb Club (its specialization is research in the field of artificial life), computer wizards from DigitalSpace and a number of other specialists, Damer's team is working on a program that should reproduce in all details the conditions on Earth preceding the appearance of life.
Two parts of the EvoGrid project. On the right: a more real and close-in-time computer simulator of life. On the left: a more distant nanofabricator of living beings (DigitalSpace illustration).
Without introducing anything unrealistic, but simply simulating the dynamics and chemical reactions of molecules in the primary solution, the machine must "wait" for the appearance of the first RNAs, then lipid membranes, puzriks – prototypes of living cells, unicellular creatures themselves, and so on, as they say, according to the list.
If all the initial conditions are reproduced correctly, the self-organization of molecules into more complex complexes will inevitably begin. Or we misrepresent the beginning of evolution on Earth. At some stage, a digital creation can already be rightfully called an organism. In its virtual universe, it feeds and reproduces (DigitalSpace illustration).
EvoGrid is based on the GROMACS computer program (GROningen MAchine for Chemical Simulations), a powerful molecular dynamics simulator created once at the Dutch University of Groningen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), and now used by scientists at a number of universities.
But instead of betting on the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the EvoGrid project intends to turn to the power of distributed computing, using the experience of projects like the famous SETI@home. Damer expects that over time, over a million private PCs will be included in the EvoGrid network.
Bruce considers himself the ideological heir of mathematician Nils Barricelli (Nils Aall Barricelli). This scientist set up the world's first computer experiments in the field of evolution and symbiogenesis (back in the early 1950s, relying on some of the earliest computers). And he was one of the pioneers of research on the topic of artificial life.
"In a sense, we have not moved away from the original Baricelli experiments," says Damer about numerical modeling of the origin of life, "Let's see how far we can advance with a million descendants of the original von Neumann machine."
When reproducing all the physical and chemical properties of the particles of the primary soup, Bruce believes, examples of self-organization will gradually appear in the machine. The systems will become more complex.
The software will look for signs of these systems in the "ocean of numbers" – regularly repeating chains of organic molecules (genome), spherical containers (prototypes of cell shells), long and stable chains of reactions (metabolism).
The key to the success of the project should be a kind of "search tree" – a set of algorithms that allow, as various parameters in the environment change (conditional squares) automatically, without human intervention, to determine the abrupt increase in the complexity of chemical systems (insets on the right) in order to report them to the owners of the experiment. "Manual" viewing of a colossal army of virtual molecules in a simulated primary soup is simply unrealistic (EvoGrid illustration).
Despite the colossal computing power of modern machines, such an evolution in numbers cannot be compared with the no less colossal volume of reactions that have been going on for millions of years in the oceans of the planet. Therefore, according to Damer's optimistic estimates, after the launch of EvoGrid, it will take from 20 to 40 years before the first cell is born on artificial Earth. But this is with today's computing speeds. If users have significantly more powerful machines, the waiting period will be reduced.
The described EvoGrid program is only part of the project of the same name. This "proto-earth" in the car is also called Origins or Deep by the authors. It is assumed that people should not interfere with what is happening after the start of the program. Otherwise, the purity of the experiment will be violated.
But the EvoGrid project provides for the parallel creation of another very similar program, called EvoGrid Broad or Intelligent Designer.
The laws of physics, chemistry and biology should also be reproduced in detail here, but users will be able to interfere with evolution by constructing both known and fantastic life forms.
EvoGrid Broad will allow you to run virtual ants traveling through a virtual forest into your computer. She can also reproduce some exotic conditions for life in order to find and pick up the structure of organisms adapted to such a life.
And then another Damer plan may come in handy, although it is already designed for a more distant future and, in part, for technologies that have not yet been created.
Bruce and his colleagues on the project came up with a virtual scanner – a kind of software and electronics complex capable of "scanning" a virtual being living in a computer universe, molecule by molecule. By recording its structure, scientists could reproduce it in reality, collecting it from organic substances step by step.
Bruce's concept of turning virtual creatures into real organisms. From left to right: an army of microprocessors "imagines" a cube filled with primary soup. In this environment, more and more complex molecules gradually appear, then the first cells, and so on. Eventually, the virtual organism gets into a virtual detector, which sends comprehensive information about the creature to the nanofabricator. The latter collects an outlandish creature from chemical reagents (EvoGrid illustration).
This is the weak point of the plan, because the body is far from just a cocktail of compounds. However, scientists have already learned how to assemble an artificial genome from chemicals, a synthetic cell, and even created self-replicating RNA enzymes. So the first steps to Bruce's fantasy have already been taken.
The future more powerful EvoGrid (let's call it EvoGrid 2.0) will allow you to create living organisms to order. And it will be a kind of digital response to the test tube machine of evolution.
And with new creatures, perhaps even built on other compounds and other carriers of hereditary information, with creatures distinguished by exotic metabolism and resistance to harsh living conditions, you can try to colonize asteroids, or terraform Mars.
At the same time, Bruce took care of the safety of the Earth. In order not to have micro– or simply organisms that threaten an ecological catastrophe appear here, the creatures created in the digital universe need to be scanned and transferred to the memory of the spacecraft computer.
This ship will head to an asteroid, where it will turn on a synthesizer (nanofabrik), which will assemble the first pair (what is not "Adam and Eve"?) new creatures from chemicals. Then the ship will release them to the surface of the heavenly mountain.
Breeding creatures will absorb sunlight and eat asteroid soil, turning it, for example, into rocket fuel (as waste of vital activity). Why not?
People flying by will be able to dock to such an asteroid for refueling, thereby expanding their capabilities to conquer the Solar System.
It's a distant future. But its reality depends on today's actions. From the upcoming launch of the EvoGrid program.
The intersection of virtual modeling with a hypothetical synthesis of life is an important difference between Bruce's idea and similar projects of his predecessors.
And if the asteroid eaters turn out to be viable, it will also be the answer to the question – whether we correctly imagine the beginning of life on our planet.
By the way, or maybe someone once created us first in a computer (more broadly, in imagination), and then populated the Earth with us? Well, not literally by people, but by life as such? And can such a "designer" be called a God?
Not a random question. Damer himself talked about this when he came up with EvoGrid. He said that if there are traces of God's plan or "God's hand" in the universe in principle, they could be identified with the help of some kind of "God detector".
Damer named his chapter in the book "Divine Action and Natural Selection: Science, Faith and Evolution" (it was published last year and was written by a number of authors) – GodDetector (PDF document). In it, he first approached the idea of a detailed numerical simulation of the conditions of the early Earth (EvoGrid illustration).
But what would he, the detector, be? Bruce believes that the desired detector can be "groped" (and then created) if the main patterns of the appearance of the living from the inanimate are revealed, which is what the EvoGrid project should be doing by and large.
Will EvoGrid become a "God detector"? We believe that the disputes will continue even after the completion of the project.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru
07.06.2009