It took me a moment to realize, even after the mention of Echopraxia, that this was Peter Watts.<p>If you enjoy hard to very-hard science fiction, I strongly recommend the first book of his series, Blindsight. I thoroughly loved the read and bounced right back to the beginning for a second read with the context I'd gained on the first one. It's an absolute firehose of concepts; reminded me a bit of Accelerando by Charles Stross but a little less pleased with its own geekiness. The best summary I could give would be a meditation on consciousness set against a first-contact backdrop.
This is one of the coolest things I've read here in some time. This is the kind of insanity I can get behind.<p>> The rest of us might think we achieve artistic immortality if our work lasts a century or three. Bök blows his nose at such puny ambitions. His work might get deciphered by Fermi aliens who finally make it to our neighborhood a billion years from now. It could be iterating right up until the sun swallows this planet whole.<p>I got frisson reading this. I may have to read the author's novels, his writing style is compelling.
Fantastic. While it's not quite at the level of Bök's work, an inevitable comparison is all of Tom7's projects (and in particular <a href="http://tom7.org/harder" rel="nofollow">http://tom7.org/harder</a>). I always love when this kind of stuff pops up onto HN. I feel that we're all interesting and experimental, and sometimes need a nudge to remember that people can do weird, neat stuff.
For those of you who read with glee of the author's work and it's launch in Toronto soon, the event is free and open to the public if you wanna flee to Toronto for fun or are already there. I hope this won't become an unlikely Superbloom given the subject.<p><a href="https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-tickets-1316627210429?aff=oddtdtcreator" rel="nofollow">https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/coach-house-spring-group-launch-...</a>
Amazing article! His writing style is unique and made me go down a rabbit hole of discovering his other works.<p>I was unaware of this demagogue of a bacterium <i>Deinococcus radiodurans</i>. It survives levels of radiation that is designed to kill <i>all</i> lifeforms. Wikipedia [0] lists this as a bacteria that supports panspermia -- that life originated elsewhere but spread through cosmic dust and was seeded on Earth eventually.<p>Fun fact: <i>Thermococcus gammatolerans</i> is known to be the one that tolerates the most toxic radiation.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans</a>
> only known organism to have ever lived on the Moon<p>Anyone know what this is referring to? The only instance I know of was the Surveyor 3 camera, which was supposedly <i>Streptococcus mitis</i> and even that situation is greatly contested.
I have a phd in a related field and I can't understand exactly what is being said here. From what I can tell, the author claims a protein was engineered, where the protein sequence maps (through a chosen translation table) to a human text. But at the same time, the protein folds into a well-defined shape (predicted, then experimentally determined), and somehow also enciphers... another poem?
This (Xenotext v2) blew my mind. I'm astonished not just by how people can think like this, but the persistence of effort to get it to fruition.<p>I have to read it a couple more times to savor this. What a delight!
Wow! Happy to read that the Xenotext went on. I’ve been following Christian Bök’s work for more than a decade and he never fails to impress me. Ulver’s musical rendition of his “Vowels” poem is just beautiful: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTh5BpUWrFw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTh5BpUWrFw</a>
This reminds me of "I'm Humanity" by Yakushimaru Etsuko, which was also etched onto a DNA of a bacteria. I love that song.<p>Also see <a href="https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2018/05/30/im-humanity/" rel="nofollow">https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2018/05/30/im-humanity...</a>
The article says<p>> "To quote Bök himself: ... It needs no oxygen to live."<p>And I assumed that this means that it's anaerobic.<p>Out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to read up about this bug (1)<p>And it says:<p>> It is an obligate aerobic chemoorganoheterotroph, i.e., it uses oxygen to derive energy from organic compounds in its environment.<p>Are they both correct? Can anyone clarify?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans</a>
De rigeur trigger warning,<p>Peter Watts' <i>Rifters</i> books (hence the domain),<p>are however full of memorable compelling ideas,<p>totally un-recommendable,<p>because they are also unedited indulgences by the author in his own sadomasochistic fantasies of sexual violence (specifically, to women), and they are in effect sexual torture-porn.