Artificial life might seem like a distinctly twenty-first century phenomenon, but already in 1863, French writer Ernest Renan envisioned a future where “natural species” would become “remnants of an aged, inconvenient world.” Yet, the birth of artificial life—self-replicating, evolving systems built from code rather than carbon—had to wait for the electronic computer, and even then, remained an obscure pursuit.

This is why Steven Levy’s Artificial Life, featured in the Fall 1992 issue of the Whole Earth Review, feels strikingly prescient. Levy writes about the work of Tom Ray, a biologist-turned-digital-alchemist whose virtual ecosystem, Tierra, evolved living code, complete with parasites and predators. Here, artificial life forms replicated, mutated, and competed fiercely for digital existence. Tom Ray believed that “virtual life is out there, waiting for us to create environments for it to evolve into.” 

Ray did all that in the ’90s. Today’s digital alchemists now have some serious compute—so what are we waiting for? Read it. Reconsider life. Then build a world.

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