Life in copious forms abounds on Earth. Some lifeforms have remained unchanged over millennia, while others have died out. Differences in fate and appearance non-withstanding, they are all made up of highly complex biochemical units calledcellswhich are the building blocks of life. The first cell, the starting point of biological evolution, was itself a product of Earth’s preceding chemical evolution. How the cell came to be in the first place is an interesting question that ultimately can be answered probabilistically in vitro [11]. Furthermore, the existence and evolution of life itself may be the inevitable consequence of the complex conditions of Earth’s early years. If this is true—if complexity gives rise to life—then it may be possible for other complex “worlds” to bear life, 1 or at the very least offer a real possibility to support certain life forms.

Computer technology has made immense strides in the last two decades. Newer and ever-more-powerful electronic elements enable the construction of digital mainframes whose capabilities would have been considered utopian just a few years ago. These mainframe capabilities can be further augmented by clustering and local to wide-area networking [21], yielding a system that is barely tractable for the user; in fact, helper computers have been proposed to administer these networks. Hence, there exist computing systems today that resemble a universe, comprised of integrated circuits and bits, whose complexity is reminiscent of the conditions in Earth’s early years. Again, if complexity gives rise to life, it is possible to speculate about life existing on and/or arising from computer systems. The only guideline we have as to how this kind of life would look like is biological life,