Tech Start-Up Offers to Upload Clients’ Consciousness to Computer
The tech start-up accelerator, Y Combinator, is investing in a company aiming to upload consciousness into a computer simulation at some point in the future when the technology exists. The one catch? You’re guaranteed to die first.
Through a combination of cryonics and embalming the brain, a company called Nectome hopes to posthumously preserve its clients’ brain tissue, under the assumption that uploading our consciousness to a computer is an inevitable future prospect. But in order for this to happen, Nectome must euthanize its clients in the process.
The company, whose slogan reads, “Committed to the goal of archiving your mind,” has recently attracted the attention of silicon valley execs who have become enamored with the prospect of living indefinitely. In addition to receiving blood transfusions from healthy teenagers, older tech luminaries are exploring the possibility that technological advancements could one day lead to immortality. At least for those who can afford it.
Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, said, “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud.”
Altman and other investors have put down a refundable $10,000 deposit, to one day have their brains embalmed and stored, though the company hasn’t been able to prove that memory can be revived from dead brain tissue.
Nectome plans to take advantage of a recent piece of legislation passed in California, known as the End of Life Option Act, which allows for physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. The company is also straightforward with its clients, calling its product “100 percent fatal.”
So why would prospective clients enthusiastically pay for something guaranteed to kill them?
“The user experience will be identical to physician-assisted suicide.” Nectome’s co-founder Robert McIntyre said, “Product-market fit is people believing that it works.”
McIntyre and cofounder Michael McCanna were recently able to acquire the corpse of a woman whose brain they were able to preserve a couple hours after she passed away. They described their process, known as aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, as “a fancy form of embalming that preserves, not just the outer details, but the inner details.”
The company recently won a significant federal grant for its use of a technique developed by MIT neuroscientist, Edward Boyden, that successfully preserved a pig’s brain, so every synapse could be seen through an electron microscope.
The idea of uploading consciousness, also known as the singularity, has been explored in sci-fi literature and film, including the Matrix and recent episodes of Black Mirror. The concept overlaps with the idea that our reality as we know it, may potentially be a computer simulation. Thought leaders in the tech world, including Elon Musk, said he believes there is a one in billions chance we are living in “base reality,” or a completely organic reality.
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What is a Stargate? Explore the Doorways of the Universe
Humans have long been obsessed with the possibility of alternate universes, and a way to instantaneously travel between this one and the next. This concept was popularized by the science-fiction TV show Stargate, and as recently as 2015, NASA admitted to having spent at least a decade researching access points to places outside our world, our universe, even beyond space and time as we know it.
The term Stargate means just that: an otherworldly door or portal to outside realms, hidden within Earth’s and space’s magnetic fields, waiting to transport the enlightened traveler to a place beyond current time limitations. While space seems to be the most likely location for these doorways to other universes, many places on planet Earth have also been attributed with special transportive capabilities, as well as noticeable shifts in energy, different frequencies, and unexplained lights or sounds.
But little to no scientific evidence has supported the theory of ‘wormholes’ in outer space, much less within the Earth’s atmosphere, until NASA’s Jack Scudder found a way to identify the elusive doorways floating between the Earth and the Sun.
Suspected Stargate Location in Space
Similar to an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or ‘worm-hole,’ the theory of formation of a space portal is that one occurs when space-time is distorted, either by the intense gravitational fields created by the collapse of a star, or by the mingling magnetic forces of the Earth and Sun crossing in space, enhanced by violent solar winds. Some of these portals are gaping holes for significantly sustained periods of time, while most are short-lived, yawning wide and re-closing several times in a day.
But Stargates can be difficult to find. Their reliable instability, elusiveness, and tendency to be tricky to spot can mean it will take years to locate one. There are no signs leading down this road, let alone pointing to it.
However, a plasma physicist, Jack Scudder, at the University of Iowa, has discovered a technique for spotting the elusive unpredictable portals. Scudder called these newly-discovered road signs X-Points, where the intersecting magnetic fields flowing between the Earth and the Sun propel vast amounts of charged particles out of the portal, easy to spot with the correct instruments and the right data.
Once Scudder was able to recognize the indications of a portal, he was able to find similar patterns occurring all over the place in the Earth’s atmosphere. Observed by NASA’s THEMIS spacecraft, they surround the Earth at a distance from 10,000 to 30,000 miles away.
Most of them seem to be located where the Sun and the Earth’s magnetic fields connect to form an unobstructed path, causing the area to pulse with charged particles that also create the Northern Lights and geomagnetic storms we sometimes witness here on Earth.
While not entirely certain what exactly these portals are, Scudder and his team remain optimistic that the answer is not beyond reach.
Stargates are a fascinating overlap of science-fiction and reality, and there are some who claim that we have access to portals here on Earth. Some locations are thought to be compass points on a map designed by sacred geometry and posses the ability to transport us to parallel universes. Among the earthly stargate sites, the most noted are the Stonehenge formation and the Bermuda Triangle, but several other locations are also attributed with being ancient alien portals.
