It Awaits Your Experiments

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&#x27;d gained on the first one. It&#x27;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&#x27;ve read here in some time. This is the kind of insanity I can get behind.<p>&gt; 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&#x27;s novels, his writing style is compelling.

Fantastic. While it&#x27;s not quite at the level of Bök&#x27;s work, an inevitable comparison is all of Tom7&#x27;s projects (and in particular <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tom7.org&#x2F;harder" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tom7.org&#x2F;harder</a>). I always love when this kind of stuff pops up onto HN. I feel that we&#x27;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&#x27;s work and it&#x27;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&#x27;t become an unlikely Superbloom given the subject.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eventbrite.ca&#x2F;e&#x2F;coach-house-spring-group-launch-tickets-1316627210429?aff=oddtdtcreator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eventbrite.ca&#x2F;e&#x2F;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deinococcus_radiodurans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deinococcus_radiodurans</a>

&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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!

The article says<p>&gt; &quot;To quote Bök himself: ... It needs no oxygen to live.&quot;<p>And I assumed that this means that it&#x27;s anaerobic.<p>Out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to read up about this bug (1)<p>And it says:<p>&gt; 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:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deinococcus_radiodurans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deinococcus_radiodurans</a>

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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RTh5BpUWrFw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RTh5BpUWrFw</a>

This reminds me of &quot;I&#x27;m Humanity&quot; by Yakushimaru Etsuko, which was also etched onto a DNA of a bacteria. I love that song.<p>Also see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ars.electronica.art&#x2F;aeblog&#x2F;en&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;30&#x2F;im-humanity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ars.electronica.art&#x2F;aeblog&#x2F;en&#x2F;2018&#x2F;05&#x2F;30&#x2F;im-humanity...</a>

De rigeur trigger warning,<p>Peter Watts&#x27; <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.

Meh. Art guided by science is like flight guided by digging.<p>Otoh science guided by art is good.