In this episode of The Yugen Podcast we talk to Bruce Damer Phd.

Describing Bruce with tittles is a misleading endeavor to pinpoint a man who has played so many roles in one incarnation. Bruce could just as well fit into the role as a “beat hippie” as he would as a “square scientist”. In the episode we don’t even come close to touching on all the mind-blowing facts about this man.

Just for orders sake we’ll make an attempt at classifying Bruce Damer so you can get a hint at just who this human being is. With emphasis on attempt.

Bruce began his career in the 80’s developing the early front-end interfaces for personal computers for IBM. This was before Windows came along. The work he did for IBM led Bruce to help out developing and organizing early multi-user virtual worlds through the Contact Consortium which hosted many of the first online experiments with users interacting using avatars. This morphed and merged into what later became the online game World of Warcraft and other mass multiplayer online role playing games.

Here’s a funny old school recording of the Avatars98 conference where Bruce shows of the hottest in online game development. An absolute hipster retro gem, it’s so hip the hipsters doesn’t even know about it yet:

https://archive.org/details/BruceDamerDemoOfEarlyAvatarvirtualWorldsAvatars98CasconToronto

Bruce also collects and archives the history of the counter-culture movement, which includes the works and archives of Timothy Leary and Terence Mckenna.

After developing about 25 projects for NASA simulating their missions, Bruce ended up in the mission design of developing a human crewed mission to asteroids, called SHEPERD Miner. This simulation can ultimately prove to be what is going to enable humanity to develop the early stages of self-sustained life on Mars.

If you are interested in this or maybe possibly what can be a future step for the Elon Musk led SpaceX missions, check out this Tedx talk where Bruce describes his SHEPERD design:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLMHcUg36yc

Bruce Damer is a futurist way beyond his time, but he is also making strides into the inquiries of humanities origins. Bruce is associate researcher in the Department of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz where he together with Professor David Deamer developed and published the “Coupled Phases model” for the origin of life and eventually the full conception of the “Terrestrial Origin of Life Hypothesis”. This is perhaps the first "end-to-end" model proposed for life's origins, extrapolating on Darwin’s hypothesis of how life might have evolved in warm “hot spring ponds”.

Bruce held another amazing Tedx talk where he goes into just how life might have evolved from simple dissolved solutes in these warm ponds. You can check that one out here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qiW4aUqtvA

Bruce also hosts his own podcast called the Levity Zone

For Dr. Bruce Damers full Bio go to

http://www.damer.com/

It’s been a treat having Bruce Damer on our podcast and a shame it took us so long to share this gem with you all. You’ll have a blast listening to it!