From QuantumVIZ to Inner Space: Original NextNower Bruce Damer at IONS Conference

Scientific American issue (August 2017) that announced the new hypothesis for life’s origins in hot spring pools on land. The research first landed on the cover of this Scientific American issue before being featured in an upcoming special issue “Revolutions in Science”.

[What if] we can find the cycle of the engine of creation, if we find we came not from competing individuals but from a network, a collaborative community that was at the tap root at the Tree of Life? — Dr. Bruce Damer

I met Bruce in June of 2002 when, together with Bonnie DeVarco, Eileen Clegg, Bill Daul and others, we participated in creating QuantumVIZ at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, described as “Social Networks, Planetary Visualization & Dynamic InfoScapes —2D, 3D, N-D —a multi-venue event for leaders in the field of information technology, geospatial visualization and global ecology.”  That event —and even more so, those people—inspired NNC’s next collaboration five years later: the International Symposium for Digital Earth 5 (ISDE5) at the University of California Berkeley, which further inspired the clarified purpose of NextNowCollab: Making the Invisible Visible.  And that original group of people, each in their own way, has been making the invisible visible ever since. 

Seventeen years after QuantumVIZ, Bruce Damer and I reunite for the occasion of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) 18th International Conference on the 50th anniversary of the first walk on the moon.  I’ll speak about the unique space DNA of the IONS organization (having been founded 46 years ago by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell), and why our legacy of consciousness research at the intersection of inner and outer space matters for humanity’s ability to responsibly steward this planet while expanding into a space-faring civilization.  Bruce, informed by his ground-breaking research into the origins of life and his own personal explorations, will provide perspectives on how the survival of our civilization can be met through a rapid evolution of our inner space — the parts of the psyche which drive all outer behavior. “As we open to an increasingly aware and healthy inner condition, we will possess the capacity to open outer space, realizing the struggle and promise of four billion years of the origin and evolution of life to expand out into the cosmos. ” — Claudia Welss