Join Bruce Damer, a scientist and director at the BIOTA Institute, as he discusses groundbreaking theories on the origin of life, including the role of meteorites and wet-dry cycling. Bruce bravely shares his journey with psychedelics, highlighting their potential to advance scientific discovery and personal transformation. He advocates for a future where psychedelics facilitate profound insights and societal change, while emphasizing the importance of mentorship in unconventional science. Delve into this intriguing blend of biology and consciousness!
01:05:26
forum Ask episode
web_stories AI Snips
view_agenda Chapters
auto_awesome Transcript
info_circle Episode notes
insights INSIGHT
Wet-Dry Cycles Spark Life
Wet-dry cycles in hot spring pools provide the thermodynamic drive needed for early polymer formation.
These cycles create layered protocellular structures acting like a chemical supercomputer searching for biological circuits.
insights INSIGHT
The Vision of Entheogenic Singularity
Future brain-computer integration could optimize psychedelic states by monitoring neural activity and delivering precise compounds.
This could enable collective ‘overmind’ experiences connecting millions to cosmic awareness simultaneously.
insights INSIGHT
Mental Organs and Psychedelic Effects
Tom Ray's mental organs theory maps brain serotonins to consciousness components.
Understanding this allows targeted psychedelic augmentation to reach ideal visionary states.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
I got to hang out with Dr. Bruce Damer recently on the beach at Kaplankaya in Turkey. Bruce is an amazing scientist, a humble guy. Who has spent his whole career trying to figure out how did life begin on Earth?
He and his co-conspirator Dr. David Deamer have figured out something that not only works as a hypothesis for how life began on Earth – but they’ve been able to reproduce it – in hot Springs.
Bruce is also a brave pioneer of using psychedelics to change his own mind, to change his own life, and to help him with insights for scientific discovery. He has also since created The Center for MINDS, which is an organization devoted to advancing scientific discovery. In part, by helping folks use psychedelics and learn about using psychedelics to go places their minds just don’t want to go otherwise.
This is a bit controversial and has been taboo for my entire life. I think it’s very important area to research. I really appreciate the people who are coming out – risking their own careers and the backlash of bias that people have – to help us figure out what’s possible with this frontier in science. Bruce has really opened up to share his own life experience with you guys and I’m really thankful to him for that.
BIOTA Institute Director and Chief Scientist Dr. Bruce Damer has spent his life pursuing two great questions: how did life on Earth begin, and how can we give that life (and ourselves) a sustainable pathway into the cosmos? He conceived of BIOTA in 1996 and guided it through its first two decades of evolution in which it hosted four conferences and a podcast (hosted by Tom Barbalet) on the use of digital spaces to simulate evolution and natural systems. A decade of scientific research with his collaborator Prof. David Deamer at the UC Santa Cruz Department of Biomolecular Engineering resulted in the Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life published in the journal Astrobiology in 2019 . In 2021, with growing global collaboration around the hypothesis, he determined that BIOTA was ready for its new mission: raising grants for students and young scientists to test this scenario for life’s origins and explore its implications for humanity. Dr. Damer also has a long career working with NASA on mission simulation and design and recently co-developed a spacecraft to utilize resources from asteroids. He is an avid collector of vintage computing hardware in his DigiBarn Computer Museum and enjoys a fine life with his partner Kathryn Lukas, 3 cats and one adorable chihuahua in their Gandalf-inspired house high up in the Santa Cruz redwoods.
Deep Future 