The lecture below was recorded in July 2024 in London as part of Antikythera’s Cognitive Infrastructures Studio lecture series.

Antikythera is a research and development institute focused on understanding the evolution of planetary intelligence and envisioning its scaling through computational systems. It takes its name from the first known computer — the antikythera mechanism — which was an instrument for planetary orientation, navigation, prediction, and planning. The name serves as inspiration for investigations of computational technologies that not only provide immense feats of calculation, but also ones that reveal and accelerate planetary intelligence.

In “Recursive Worlds”, Sara Walker redefines life as a physical process that structures matter through recursive information across deep time. Challenging conventional physics, she introduces assembly theory to describe how complex objects—including molecules, technologies, and living systems—emerge only through informational lineages. Rather than viewing life as spontaneous or reducible to chemistry, Walker argues that living systems operate beyond a measurable threshold of complexity, constructing new possibility spaces in a combinatorially vast universe. Earth, in this framework, is the largest known object in time, hosting a biosphere and technosphere that are recursively stacked and increasingly capable of perceiving their own origins. As the technosphere grows, it becomes not merely a byproduct of biology but a continuation of planetary evolution, possibly leading to biospheric reproduction. The talk invites a shift in physics toward a model where information, history, and recursive causation are central to understanding life, intelligence, and the future of planetary systems.