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I think you have "fantastic" and "real world" backwards. The Blue Brain project is planned to have an uploaded rat brain this year (2014). Uploading human minds
by cousin_it 13y ago
I think you have "fantastic" and "real world" backwards. The Blue Brain project is planned to have an uploaded rat brain this year (2014). Uploading human minds is very likely to be closer than capturing the whole energy output of the Sun, which is discussed in the OP.
Though uploading will likely cause so many changes that space exploration will seem insignificant in comparison, see Robin Hanson's "The crack of a future dawn" [1] and Carl Shulman's "Whole brain emulation and the evolution of superorganisms" [2]. In general I think most people don't take this scenario seriously enough, the authors I mention are the rare exceptions.
[1] http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html http://hanson.gmu.edu/uploads.html
[2] https://intelligence.org/files/WBE-Superorgs.pdf https://intelligence.org/files/WBE-Superorgs.pdf
- darkmighty 13y agoThe Blue Brain project will have a rat brain model. It reproduces some of the responses you'd expect from a real. That's orders of magnitude of technical progress away from what an upload would require. We don't even know for sure if it's physically possible to perform an upload (due to quantum mechanics), much less have a device which can come close to measure a significant part of the quantum state of a working brain (i.e. the technical problems beyond physical feasibility).
- jessedhillon 13y agoCan you point to some introductory reading about the quantum mechanical effects at work in the brain? I've read The Emperor's New Mind but was left with the impression that it was more conjecture than research.
- wazoox 13y agoI'm afraid you fell for the hype. We're still unable to understand the puny brain of Caenorhabditis elegans, or how the bees achieve all that they can do with as little a brain. Rat brain is several orders of magnitude harder.