I’ve known Bruce for over a decade but mostly as he relates to the psychedelic folks found at The Farm. He’s perhaps the most interesting person I will ever meet, and I don’t say that lightly.
He’s also super inspiring, especially for those folks that question whether they can make a difference or contribute something of value to humanity and trying to turn their visions into reality. So I thought I would share.
He’s a rare type of human. Makes his own clothes (doesn’t wear them when he has meetings at NASA), designer of his own revolutionary spaceship system SHEPARD
( SHEPHERD by Dr. Peter Jenniskens technical intro (SETI talks excerpt) Asteroid Day June 30, 2015 - YouTube)
as a younger man he was a good friend of TMK, an early describer of VR, maintains a computer museum in a “digibarn” on his property,
( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB69gAspqxjLySkgBprePNwJg8YAxAkEw ),
has designed or been a part of many current space missions currently hurtling through the void, including doing the modeling of at least 25 NASA missions alone, holder of a portion of the Leary Archives (via Denis Berry of Tim’s Futique Trust), and basically does things in his spare time that whole University departments are dedicated to and actually manages to be a key player none the less.
The last few years he has been using his time pondering (and doing a lot of fieldwork)concerning the mysteries surrounding the (or an) origin of Life (on Earth) and elucidating possible conditions and mechanisms associated with the necessary building blocks needed by the earliest proto-biota.
That would be things such as lipids that could wrap around and form a sort of proto-cell membrane (some of you are doing something like this with your water solubles), and then trying to discover and describe the “engines” or mechanical process (known to be present at that time) that would make it possible to generate said chemical species. And then trying to do that under controlled laboratory conditions.
He doesn’t use computer modeling for this, instead choosing to design an instrument with an array of tiny vessels that are injected with actual physical compounds, subjected to whatever force or “engine”, analyzed and then ejected, repeat. Something like that anyway! lol
He built a machine capable of doing this in his garage and when a friend and fellow scientist at the local University heard about it, invited Dr. Bruce down and built (or was building) a giant university version.
He and his group had their ideas explored in a cover story in Scientific American back in 2017
Dr. Bruce also happens to be one of the nicest, most gentle ,loving, and sane people you could ever meet.
Anyway, as many of us here have the luxury of a nice amount of time to ponder things while working, i thought at least a few folks on here might appreciate the thought-fodder.
Here is his paper describing their working model.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2019.2045
A youtube playlist Introduction to the man and some of his ideas, including a bunch of the modeling animations of both NASA’s spacecraft system/missions and his own called SHEPARD:
love the share MJ thnak you