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Cultured Culture: Intelligent micro-organisms
This is a rough placeholder for a panel idea for Swancon 2010. Comments, suggestions, references welcome.
A discussion about distributed intelligence in the ecosphere (the algal bloom likes to play chess), and/or infectious micro-organisms with the ability to communicate with each other or their host. Communicate/influence/control. Nature has helpful and devious parasites and symbionts aplenty, but are they/were they/could they evolve to be clever? Chatty?
The international GoH Scott Sigler has done this in his books (e.g. Infected). See also Blood Music by Greg Bear and the works of Joan Slonczewski (e.g. Brain Plague), who's microbes evolve not only political systems and philosophies, but nightclubs and poverty, all at the rate of one generation per human day.
And let's not forget that old chestnut, evolving sentience in nanotechnology.
Stuff like that with, I dunno, structure and intelligence. Grammar even.
It would be handy *HINT HINT* if the leftover suggestions from the 2009 panel suggestion database could be published soon. It was always meant to overflow into following years. No, I'm not sneaking around the committee's back; I've already asked directly more than once.
A discussion about distributed intelligence in the ecosphere (the algal bloom likes to play chess), and/or infectious micro-organisms with the ability to communicate with each other or their host. Communicate/influence/control. Nature has helpful and devious parasites and symbionts aplenty, but are they/were they/could they evolve to be clever? Chatty?
The international GoH Scott Sigler has done this in his books (e.g. Infected). See also Blood Music by Greg Bear and the works of Joan Slonczewski (e.g. Brain Plague), who's microbes evolve not only political systems and philosophies, but nightclubs and poverty, all at the rate of one generation per human day.
And let's not forget that old chestnut, evolving sentience in nanotechnology.
Stuff like that with, I dunno, structure and intelligence. Grammar even.
It would be handy *HINT HINT* if the leftover suggestions from the 2009 panel suggestion database could be published soon. It was always meant to overflow into following years. No, I'm not sneaking around the committee's back; I've already asked directly more than once.
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quorum sensing I presume you know about. And there's plenty of microbes that form branching networks... possibly actinomycetes or genuine fungi could approximate a neural net?
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I like this idea.
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Prk
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