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A PROPOSAL TO CREATE TWO BIODIVERSITY RESERVES: ONE DIGITAL AND ONE ORGANIC

The digital reserve will be distributed across the global net, and will create a space for the evolution of new virtual life forms. The organic reserve will be located in the rain forests of northern Costa Rica, and will secure the future of existing organic life forms.

The Digital Reserve:

The proposed project will create a very large, complex and inter-connected region of cyberspace that will be inoculated with digital organisms which will be allowed to evolve freely through natural selection. The objective is to set off a digital analog to the Cambrian explosion of diversity, in which multi-cellular digital organisms (parallel MIMD processes) will spontaneously increase in diversity and complexity. If successful, this evolutionary process will allow us to find the natural form of parallel processes, and will generate extremely complex digital information processes that fully utilize the capacities inherent in our parallel and networked hardware. The project will be funded through the donation of spare CPU cycles from thousands of machines connected to the net, by running the reserve as a low priority background process on participating nodes.

The Organic Reserve:

The proposed project aims to prevent the imminent destruction of some of the last remaining large areas of rain forest in the Sarapiqui; region of Northern Costa Rica, and at the same time, to use those forests to establish a conservation economy through a community based nature tourism project. The conservation economy is needed to insure the long term stability of both the present and future protected areas of Sarapiqui;, by creating an economic interest group within the human populations surrounding the protected forests. The overall project contains six stages, which will be executed in succession, as funding reaches the corresponding target levels. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is acting as fiscal agent, and the Costa Rican government has expressed a willingness to expropriate the target properties if necessary. This project is being organized and supported by a coalition of conservation organizations: Sarapiqui; Association for Forests and Wildlife, OTS (The Organization for Tropical Studies), TNC, FUNDECOR (The Foundation for the Development of the Central Volcanic Mountain Range), COMBOS (The Conservation and Management of Tropical Forests), and ABAS (The Association for the Environmental Well being of Sarapiqui;).





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Thomas S.Ray
Tue Aug 1 16:54:18 JST 1995