Category Archives: Mind Uploading

From Texas Standard:

Selene Moreno is a senior at Benito Juarez-Abraham Lincoln High School in La Joya, Texas. She says shes looking forward to graduation.

Im planning to become a physical therapist after I graduate from high school and Im planning on going to Texas A&M, Moreno says.

Moreno is petite and soft-spoken. Shes also ambitious taking college courses and a bunch of AP classes. That can be especially difficult because she doesnt have Internet access at home.

Some parts of Texas are at the epicenter of what's called the digital divide. Thats the gulf between those who have ready access to computers and theInternet,and those who dont.

The Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas found the two metropolitan areas in the country with the lowest broadband access are in the Rio Grande Valley. Those most impacted by the digital divide may be students in the Valley from low-income families, like Moreno.

Moreno does have some access to the Internet, but she says it isnt enough.

I do have a cellphone and that has Internet, but sometimes its really slow and its hard to catch up because it takestimeto get it done, she says. I wish I had fast Internet to get it done faster.

She often finds herself having to work on projects until 2 or 3 a.m.

I remember one time I stayed up to cry, Moreno says. I worked through my tears to stay up late. And sometimes I would come sleepless to school and I wouldnt be able to concentrate the next day.

Moreno's story isnt unique.

Clem Garza is La Joya Independent School District's Director of Instructional Resources and Technology.

Theresparents that sit, take lawn chairs, outside a campus so they can access the web, Garza says. There are students that sit outside by the fence on the grass so they can access the web to do homework. And that tugged at me and that visual never left my mind.

So Garza came up with a plan.

We equipped the buses with routers and antennas so that our students are able to accessInterneton the school buses, Garza says.

Only two of the district's buses have Internet access right now.

Equipping thebusescost a little more than $4,000. But this is not an out-of-pocket expense for the district. Verizon and other businesses are paying for it.

Juarez LincolnHigh School teacher Karim Briseno says the program is also helping teachers. They now feel better about assigning projects that require Internet access. Although most families dont have the Internet at home, kids do ride the bus.

If they spend that much time, from 30 to 45 minutes on the bus, Briseno says, Im pretty sure they can use that time in order for them to do research, homework [and] communicate with teachers [any] questions they might have.

Briseno says she hopes the program will soon be accessible to more students.

I think every bus should have Wifi, Briseno says.

An expansion is in the works, but first La Joya ISD needs to look at the data from the pilot program.

How many users logged on, what types of sites, not necessarily individual sites, but let's say how many educational sites were accessed, how many social sites were accessed, Garza says. Were able to use that and then to see are they mainly streaming, are they downloading, uploading? What are the students doing?

Garza says that information will go to the school board. Itll be up to the board to implement the program. One thing that will help her case, Garza has already found funding for 20 of the 261 buses in the district.

Read the rest here:

How a WiFi Pilot Program Is Helping Students in the Rio Grande Valley - KWBU

KHLOE KARDASHIAN'S boyfriend looks in for a treat this Valentines Day.

The Keeping Up With The Kardashians favourite's friend Jen Atkin shared a sexy snap of the blonde posing in a white lace corset.

To spare the 32-year-olds blushes however, she covered her nipples with red hearts before uploading to Instagram.

It comes following reports that Kim Kardashians younger sister has been talking marriage with Tristan Thompson.

The Revenge Body star and her25-year-old basketball player beau have only been dating for five months but it sounds like things are hotting up fast.

A source reportedly told US Weekly: "Theyve talked about getting married."

"She'd be happy about an engagement, they added.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Khloe Kardashian's changing body

Khloe Kardashian shows off the extent of her weight loss as she teams up with Protein World [Protein World ]

Khlo Kardashian has been through an incredible body transformation over the years we take a look at the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star's amazing results

Khloe's divorce from ex-husband Lamar Odom was finalised last year.

While she has clearly has moved on, Lamar is said to still beholding out for a reconciliation, branding Tristan "a placeholder".

"Lam needs TT to know how madly in love he still is with Khloe and wants Tristan to understand that he and Khloe have unfinished business."

He doesn't want to disrespect what they have, but he thinks Tristan is just like James Harden and French Montana a placeholder in her life for when he returns,: a source toldHollywood Life.

For his own part, Lamar was seen in an episode of TV show The Doctor, which aired in December telling presenter Dr Stork: "Honestly, I want my wife back."

It was filmed soon after he left a rehabilitation centre where he checked in to "focus on himself".

The 37-year-oldtook anear-fatal overdoseduring his now infamous visit to a Nevada-based brothel in October 2015.

Koko supported him at this time and it appeared then that they might get back together when she withdrew her divorce petition.

However the divorce did go ahead and now it seems that Khloe's mind is made up, tellingExtrahow she hoped that Tristan was "the one.

She explained: "I think that's why we all are in relationships to find the one.

"And, I mean, I am in love with him. I think he's, like, the best. And yeah, I hope so.

"Only time will tell."

Here is the original post:

Khloe Kardashian narrowly avoids a wardrobe malfunction in sexy underwear photo - OK! Magazine

From Texas Standard:

Selene Moreno is a senior at Benito Juarez-Abraham Lincoln High School in La Joya, Texas. She says shes looking forward to graduation.

Im planning to become a physical therapist after I graduate from high school and Im planning on going to Texas A&M, Moreno says.

Moreno is petite and soft-spoken. Shes also ambitious taking college courses and a bunch of AP classes. That can be especially difficult because she doesnt have Internet access at home.

Some parts of Texas are at the epicenter of what's called the digital divide. Thats the gulf between those who have ready access to computers and theInternet,and those who dont.

The Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas found the two metropolitan areas in the country with the lowest broadband access are in the Rio Grande Valley. Those most impacted by the digital divide may be students in the Valley from low-income families, like Moreno.

Moreno does have some access to the Internet, but she says it isnt enough.

I do have a cellphone and that has Internet, but sometimes its really slow and its hard to catch up because it takestimeto get it done, she says. I wish I had fast Internet to get it done faster.

She often finds herself having to work on projects until 2 or 3 a.m.

I remember one time I stayed up to cry, Moreno says. I worked through my tears to stay up late. And sometimes I would come sleepless to school and I wouldnt be able to concentrate the next day.

Moreno's story isnt unique.

Clem Garza is La Joya Independent School District's Director of Instructional Resources and Technology.

Theresparents that sit, take lawn chairs, outside a campus so they can access the web, Garza says. There are students that sit outside by the fence on the grass so they can access the web to do homework. And that tugged at me and that visual never left my mind.

So Garza came up with a plan.

We equipped the buses with routers and antennas so that our students are able to accessInterneton the school buses, Garza says.

Only two of the district's buses have Internet access right now.

Equipping thebusescost a little more than $4,000. But this is not an out-of-pocket expense for the district. Verizon and other businesses are paying for it.

Juarez LincolnHigh School teacher Karim Briseno says the program is also helping teachers. They now feel better about assigning projects that require Internet access. Although most families dont have the Internet at home, kids do ride the bus.

If they spend that much time, from 30 to 45 minutes on the bus, Briseno says, Im pretty sure they can use that time in order for them to do research, homework [and] communicate with teachers [any] questions they might have.

Briseno says she hopes the program will soon be accessible to more students.

I think every bus should have Wifi, Briseno says.

An expansion is in the works, but first La Joya ISD needs to look at the data from the pilot program.

How many users logged on, what types of sites, not necessarily individual sites, but let's say how many educational sites were accessed, how many social sites were accessed, Garza says. Were able to use that and then to see are they mainly streaming, are they downloading, uploading? What are the students doing?

Garza says that information will go to the school board. Itll be up to the board to implement the program. One thing that will help her case, Garza has already found funding for 20 of the 261 buses in the district.

View post:

How a WiFi Pilot Program Is Helping Students in the Rio Grande Valley - Texas Public Radio

When looking for a new job, the majority of professionals need to conduct their job search without their current employer knowing. And with the advent of social media, and the importance of using LinkedIn in your search, it can be difficult to know how to conduct a job search effectively, yet discreetly.

First, take heart knowing you are not alone. According to LinkedIn's 2015 Talent Trends report, nearly one in three employees are actively searching for a new job a lot of professionals. So how can you go about looking for a new job, including utilizing LinkedIn and networking within your industry, without everyone finding out? Here are a few pointers:

Consider an internal change. When job searching, many people don't fully consider whether there is an opportunity for them in their own backyard. Before you send your resume to other companies, ask yourself if you are unhappy with your role and the organization you work for, or if it is just about your current job. Evaluate all options before you launch into a search.

Consider if there would be an opportunity for you within your current organization that would provide more job satisfaction. If there is, take the time to find out more before you make your final decision. You never know. When people are unsatisfied with their jobs, they tend to feel like they have to make a dramatic change. And nine times out of 10, they don't need to; they only need to make a course correction.

Don't search during work hours. It is unprofessional to search for a new job while on the clock at your current position. It may be tempting to do so if you are having a slow day or are incredibly unhappy in your job, but there is another thing to keep in mind besides professionalism. Most companies have a transparency policy with their computers and other devices, so keep in mind nothing you do is necessarily private on their devices.

Although not all companies spy on their employees, you never know when they might schedule a random check of websites you visit or emails you send. If you decide you really need to check on organizations currently hiring or make an urgent call about a job interview while on a work break, don't do so on your office computer, phone or tablet. And do it on your lunch hour. Keep your searches on your personal devices and on your own time.

Enable stealth mode online. LinkedIn and other job-search applications have settings to let you job search discreetly. These settings are always evolving, so make sure you understand how these features work in each application and that they haven't been changed before uploading a resume and cover letter. For example, on LinkedIn you can disable the feature where other users are notified if you make updates or changes to your profile. Check out your applications' privacy features thoroughly prior to launching your search.

And keep in mind that on LinkedIn, even though users may not be notified that you are making changes, you may want to make your updates slowly over time so they attract less attention, especially with a public profile.

Be careful who you tell. If you have decided that you need to make a change to a new organization or career path, you will want to share your news with your network and people who can assist you with your search. But before you tell everyone, consider the possible implications with each person.

If your uncle is close friends with your boss's boss, will the news accidentally be shared over a game of golf, for example? If you tell your close work buddies, could the news accidentally slip out at work when your boss can overhear? And if your industry is small and close-knit, does that mean that news could travel quickly? Whoever you decide to share your news with while you are still job searching, ask them to be discreet as well.

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Companies are checking you out online, so why not use social media to enhance your qualifications? A 2015CareerBuilder surveyof more than 2,000 hiring managers and human resource professionals revealed that 52 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates.In fact, about one-thirdof thoseemployers have found content that made them more likely to hire a candidate. Here's howto build a positive, professional online presence to help you stand out.

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Almost 40 percent of those surveyed said that a candidate's personality on social media seemed like a good fit with company culture. How often have you thought: "If only I could get in front of someone and prove I am a good fit?" With social media, you can inject your style in status updates and even your LinkedIn summary. Sure, your skills and experience qualify you for jobs, but your personality is one more way to seal the deal.

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When employers see how your background information supports your qualifications for the job, you look like the real deal. Forty-two percent of employers liked the idea of being able to validate a candidate's experience by checking him or her out on social media. Make sure your LinkedIn and other social network profiles are consistent and match your rsum.

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What you say in your bio and on social profiles provides hiring managers with a glimpse of your professionalism. Thirty-eight percent of employers were impressed with the professional image presented by a candidate's site. Use a high-quality photo (preferably a headshot) with a neutral background that's free of distractions, such as pets or people. Wear work-appropriateclothes no prom pictures or beach shots. And pay attention to small details, such as grammar, punctuation, capitalization and spacing.

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You say you have excellent communication skills, but how can you further provide proof? Thirty-seven percent of employers said social network profiles and status updates offered evidence of great communication skills. As with your profile, punctuation, spelling and grammar are important in tweets, too. And remember to behave appropriately online. Avoid arguments, profanity and negative rants.

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In a similar CareerBuilder survey of more than 2,000 hiring and HR managers last year, 40 percent of employers selected candidates who seemed well-rounded on their profiles and social media updates. Share your volunteer involvement and other activities that show how you enjoy spending your free time. However, avoid mentioning controversial or extreme interests.

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Employers often seek candidates who can think outside the box. Thirty-six percent of theemployers in last year's surveysaida candidate's creativity on social media made a difference in the hiring decision. Show off your creative abilities online by displaying an infographic rsum, using new technology or posting clever status updates.

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Thirty percent of companies liked seeing references posted about a candidate, according to the 2014 survey. Unsolicited or nonreciprocal recommendations are powerful. LinkedIn allows you to display recommendations within your profile, so be sure to ask a boss or happy customer to write one for you. You can make it even easier for them when you provide suggestions or key points you believe are worth mentioning.

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In your cover letter or rsum, you may have said you were a top performer or gained recognition for your stellar accomplishments. In the 2014 survey, 31 percent of employers found proof of such recognition online and said it worked in the candidates' favor. Snap a photo or grab a screenshot to capture your success. Then share it for all to see, and embed it in your LinkedIn profile.

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Companies with social media accounts want to engage in conversation. Twenty-four percent of theemployers in last year's surveysaid they liked it when a candidate interacted with one of their social media accounts. Check the company's website to see which social networks are listed, especially the accounts related to careers. Always be positive and complimentary, and ask questions beyond: "Did you get my application?"

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Fourteen percent of employers see a large following or subscriber base as a positive, according to the 2014 survey. If people are following you, then you might just have something interesting or valuable to say. Thought leadership and community engagement can benefit the company. Build your following organically by providing information that is valuable to your target audience. Interact with like-minded professionals online. Gaining a following isn't easy. But, if you are a good social community citizen, it could be an asset to your future employer.

Read more here:

Looking for a New Job? 4 Ways to Job Search Discreetly - U.S. News & World Report (blog)

Are you livingyour life for you or for other peoples opinion of you? Are you tryingto earn bragging rights for empty instances of your life? Are you trying to convince everyone that you are living the life of your dreams, when it is actually far from true?

As human beings, at one point or the other in our existence, we all seek validation. Everyone loves to be seen and heard. Since the advent of Facebook and other social media applications, being seen and heard just moved to another level. It has gone way overboard, such that most people have lost touch with reality. They live under illusions, wishes and hopes.

Where do we really draw the line between trying to be heard and showing off? How do we differentiate between reality and vanity when many have virtually lost touch with reality in a bid to keep up with the Joneses.

Have you been at a church wedding where the sermon was going on and people were outside taking pictures with their expensive gadgets? There are some who are even daring enough to take pictures right inside the church. At that point, they dont care about enjoying the event, because showing off to people is better than being present there

But why is it that the first thing that comes to mind after dressing up for an occasion is how to upload mixes to social media?

Is it an attention seeking disorder to want other peoples reassurance that we look good or that the clothes we wear look good on us? Or is it an insecurity issue?

Why is marriage a competition on Facebook? You will see people uploading their wedding pictures on the same night they are supposed to be tired and be in bed.

What is the brain behind all the long names? Who is competing your spouses name with you that you just have to put everything out there? Sometimes up to four names. For example, Yetunde Olasiyan Adebayo Phillips. What does that mean? Some who try to be modest go like this: Yetunde-Adebayo Phillips.

Is Facebook a form of official page where you must do a change of name? Even our official change of names dont look anything near this. It is strictly your name and new surname.

With the way people churn out beautiful messages and poetry lyrics to their boo and bae on Facebook, they give me a run for my money. Why? Because so many writers have now evolved on Facebook with the almost perfect way they write out these inspirational messages. I am talking about a full page of tributes.

If everybodys boo and bae is this perfect on social media, who then owns those ones who are mummys pets, those that beat their wives or those who act like garrison commanders in their homes?

Im not writing a tribute is bad, but what is the motive behind it? Is it to truly appreciate your spouse or to pretend to the whole world that your spouse is almost faultless?

Then why is it a problem when your post doesnt get many likes or comment and you get resentful against those who werent loyal enough to support your appreciation of your spouse. Those silent resentments are very real though unspoken. You hear things like he/she has never liked my posts, I wont like his picture too.

Having everybody know that we have visited the abroad isnt even the big deal but when we do not know the limits at which putting pictures at the restaurant, on the street of DC, in the swimming pool(of probably your neighbour ) becomes a little bit distateful and no longer appealing.

But before you say, go and argue these points with your village deity. What concerns you with other peoples habits anyways? Arent we all guilty one way or the other? Ifwe all do the same thing in an attempt to be different, dont we all end up being the same person in the process?

Of course, there are wonderful talented people on Facebook who are wordsmiths and are role models. Thats one positive thing. These people share inspiring and revelational thoughts that brings healthy discussions.

Asides this, arent we gradually turning into a profane people? Arent we gradually projecting false personalities? A place where I worked had banned its workers from accessing Facebook during office hours. The connection was even suspended such that you could not access certain social sites except check and respond to your mails. It was discovered that good quality productive time was spent on the internet.

Why is it that instead of people to help accident victims or someone undergoing jungle justice, people would rather stand and take live videos and photos?

During my mums burial(she died young and it wasnt a celebration), I was shocked that some people were moving up and down in front of me and my siblings, trying to take our pictures. We were looking so sad and forlorn; yet, they kept brandishing their IPads and tabs just to take videos and photos. They kept distracting and blocking my view.

We even had to tell one of them to go and sit down.

What about you? What do you do on social media?

Photo Credit: Kadettmann | Dreamstime.com

Here is a sneak peek; she is a freelance writer, blogger and poet. Blogs at yettyolas.wordpress.com Please contact her for any freelance writing gigs on any topic via nikeolasiyan@yahoo.com Follow her on twitter@nikeolasiyan.

Read more:

Yetunde Olasiyan: Between Having a Voice & the Need to Show Off on Social Media - Bella Naija

Six-year-old children are as digitally advanced today as 10-year-olds were three years ago and nearly half of them use the internet for general online browsing, new research reveals.

A worrying 44% of children aged six are using the internet alone in their bedrooms and 41% of them are using it at home without supervision.

They are using social media , streaming content, and even uploading their own videos to YouTube.

To mark Safer Internet Day, web safety group Internet Matters are urging parents to take action at an early age and keep their children safe online.

Alarmingly the number of parents saying they are always present to supervise their child aged six when they are online, using computer devices, has gone down in the last three years from 53% to 43%.

Mum-of-four Zoe Holland, 39, from Uckfield, East Sussex, has noticed the changes first hand as her children Morris, 12, Leon, 10, Daisy, six and Logan, one, have gravitated towards spending more time online.

She and husband Matt, 37, are constantly learning when it comes to monitoring their children on the internet.

She says: Daisy mostly uses my tablet so I manage the device that shes on and shell mostly use the tablet for going on cartoons on Netflix and games.

"But my older children are interested in making their own YouTube videos and have their own YouTube accounts.

"Theyre so technology savvy, were not always aware of what theyre up to. I can see them becoming more advanced at understanding the internet in the future.

It can be isolating for children if you dont let them have the smart phones that their friends at school have, theres a lot of peer pressure.

Zoe, who runs blog jugglingonrollerskates.com, reveals that she worries about what her kids can be exposed to online.

It terrifies me what they can just look up on Google, she says. I would hate them to come across something that is shocking.

"Weve made it a rule that theyre not allowed to delete their internet history so we have that awareness. But its a learning curve.

"We are looking in to accountability apps - where you monitor and control what the children use on the phone. For peace of mind and visibility we want to know whats going on. Its all about trust.

EastEnders actor Danny-Boy Hatchard, who plays Lee Carter in the BBC soap, thinks that internet safety should be taught in schools.

The star, working with Safer Internet Day, told the Mirror: Social media safety should be on the national curriculum.

Children need to be taught about these tools to educate them and make sure theyre in a safe environment when theyre online. Parents need to monitor their kids use closely.

Pyschologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos, author of Unfollow: Living Life On Your Own Terms, says: This research shows just how quickly young children are advancing in the digital world.

"It also serves as a stark reminder why parents need to be extra vigilant and arm their children with the tools to stay safe online.

As well as setting up the relevant parental controls, its important to make sure you set boundaries when it comes to how your children use the internet at home.

Today is Safer Internet Day. For more information, help and resources, go to http://www.saferinternet.org.uk .

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How to keep your children safe online as it's revealed half of six-year-olds use the internet - Mirror.co.uk

On a quiet summer evening, the Aurora, a 60ft cutter-rigged sloop, approaches the craggy shore of eastern Greenland, along what is known as the Forbidden Coast. Its captain, Sigurdur Jonsson, a sturdy man in his 50s, stands carefully watching his charts. The waters he is entering have been described in navigation books as among the most difficult in Greenland; the mountains rise almost vertically from the sea to form a narrow bulwark, with rifts through which active glaciers discharge quantities of ice, while numerous off-lying islets and rocks make navigation hazardous. The sloop is single-masted, painted a cheery, cherry red. Icebergs float in ominous silence.

Where Jonsson, who goes by Captain Siggi, sails, he is one of few to have ever gone. Because the splintered fjords create thousands of miles of uninhabited coastline, there has been little effort to map this region. Its practically uncharted, he says. You are almost in the same position as you were 1,000 years ago.

A naval architect turned explorer, Siggi navigates by scanning aerial photos and uploading them into a plotter, the ships electronic navigation system. Sometimes he uses satellite images, sometimes shots taken by Danish geologists from an open-cockpit plane in the 1930s, on one of the only comprehensive surveys of the coast. Siggi sails by comparing what he sees on the shore to these rough outlines. Of course, then you dont have any soundings, he says, referring to charts of ocean depths that sailors normally rely on to navigate and avoid running aground. Ive had some close calls. Over the years, he has got better at reading the landscape to look for clues. He looks for river mouths, for example, where silt deposits might create shallow places to anchor, so that icebergs will go to ground before they crush the boat. In the age of GPS and Google Maps, its rare to meet someone who still entrusts his life to such analogue navigation.

Even when Siggi is retracing his own steps, the landscape of the Forbidden Coast is constantly changing. Where the glaciers have disappeared, he explains, pointing at washes of green on a creased, hand-drawn chart, a peninsula turns out to be an island. It was actually sea where you thought there was land. To account for this, he often trades notes with local hunters, who are similarly adept at reading the coast. Their language is very descriptive, Siggi explains. So all the names of places mean something. Although locations may have official Danish names, they are often ignored. An island technically called Kraemer, for instance, in East Greenlandic means the place that looks like the harness for a dogs snout.

Until a century ago, Greenlandic hunters would cut maps out of driftwood. The wooden part would be the fjord, so it would be a mirror image, Siggi says. Holes would be islands. Compared to a paper map, it was actually quite accurate. These driftwood sculptures were first recorded by a Danish expedition in the 1880s, along with bas-relief versions of fjords, carefully grooved and bevelled to represent headland depths. A Danish ethnologist, Gustav Holm, noted that notched into the wood, the map likewise indicates where a kayak can be carried when the path between fjords is blocked by ice. Unlike drawings, the contoured wood could be felt by hand useful in a region where the sun disappears for months at a time.

As a source of information, a map is always a way of groping through the darkness of the unknown. But locating yourself in space has never been cartographys sole function: like these driftwood pieces, maps inevitably chart how cultures perceive not only their landscapes but their lives.

Everything we do is some kind of spatial interaction with objects or ourselves, says John Hessler, a specialist in geographic information systems at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. A map is a way to reduce this huge complexity of our everyday world. For the last few decades, Hessler has been conducting research in the librarys map collection the largest in the world in stacks the lengths of football fields. Geographic information systems have revolutionised everything, he says.

Explorers have long filled in our understanding of the world, using and then discarding the sextant, the compass, MapQuest. The project of mapping the Earth properly is to some extent complete, Hessler says. But while there are no longer dragons fleshing out far-flung places, a surprising number of spaces are still uncharted and the locations we have discovered to explore have only expanded. Where we were just trying to accurately map terrestrial space, Hessler says, we have moved into a metaphor for how we live. Were mapping things that dont have a physical existence, like internet data and the neural connections in our heads.

From mapping the dark between stars to the patterns of disease outbreaks, who is making maps today, and what those maps are used for, says a lot about the modern world. Now anything can be mapped, says Hessler. Its the wild west. We are in the great age of cartography, and were still just finding out what its powers are.

The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station sits on the Earths axis, at an altitude just above 9,000ft, in the worlds largest, coldest desert, where a small settlement of metal shipping containers takes shape in rows on a windblown sheet of continental ice. Heavy equipment beeps in the polar air. In these harsh conditions, Naoko Kurahashi Neilson has been trying to map black holes.

Its a thorny problem: how do you map something you cannot see? Normally, when you look up at the sky and see a star, the star emitted a light particle called a photon that travelled millions of years and ended up in your eyeball, Kurahashi Neilson explains. Thats how your eye knows theres a star there. But photons, like almost everything else, cannot escape a black holes gravity. Among the only things that can are tiny, high-energy particles called neutrinos, which do not often interact with other matter trillions of them pass through our bodies every second. So detecting neutrinos requires using a massive object. Kurahashi Neilson, for example, began looking for them by using the ocean itself. Very high-energy neutrinos make a splash when they enter water, she says. To detect those splashes, she installed highly sensitive microphones in the waters off the Bahamas, but soon realised that she would need much better equipment.

The answer was at the South Pole Station, amid the summer chaos when scientists around the world flock to take advantage of the short season. Kurahashi Neilson joined the team running the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory, where scientists have created a particle detector so large it covers a cubic kilometre, with sensors buried beneath a mile and a half of ice. As part of her job researching neutrinos, she needed to upgrade the computers. When neutrinos are detected, the information is reported back to a massive collection centre that scientists around the world can access. However, there is no easy way for scientists in, say, Wisconsin, to communicate with the computers at the South Pole. The internet for the South Pole Station comes from satellites, which, in polar regions, often orbit below the horizon. Most of the day, you cant connect from the South Pole to the outside world, says Kurahashi Neilson. So even if its a simple algorithm update, you have to go do it yourself.

As an assistant professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Kurahashi Neilson is using these tiny particles to study the biggest ideas. She hopes that mapping where neutrinos come from will lead to the discovery of new black holes, and possibly explain what physical processes take place inside them. Because the majority of neutrinos were created around 14bn years ago, shortly after the birth of the universe, this might help answer a fairly fundamental question: what are the conditions that create energy?

The only way to study something you cant go to or touch is to look at it in many different ways, Kurahashi Neilson says. The funny thing is, if you map the universe in optical light what humans see or gamma rays, or radio rays, our universe doesnt look the same. Thats the beauty of this. You create a map of the same thing in different light, and when you compare them, you understand the universe better.

Whether on the Forbidden Coast or tracking neutrinos at the South Pole, this curiosity to compare, to see something no one has seen before is a fairly basic human compulsion. Thats why Robert Becker a radio astronomer who has recently retired from the University of California, Davis got into physics. When he started studying astronomy, the only map of the entire sky was a simple contour map, like the ones used for hiking. In the 1990s, Becker decided to conduct a Very Large Array radio survey using radio waves to map the sky in much greater detail finding scores of new phenomena.

In most other areas of science, a question leads to an experiment that tests a hypothesis. In astronomy, you cannot conduct experiments. We cant build new stars, Becker explains. So we do survey maps. The goal is to create a catalogue of the sky, which is essentially a record of all the ongoing experiments in space. In an infinite universe, all things that can happen will happen, Becker says, paraphrasing Douglas Adams.

Hes not being cute; this is one of the fundamental principles of quantum physics. We can only observe as far as light has had the chance to travel in the 13.7bn years since the big bang. But space-time extends far beyond that. Because there are only a finite number of ways particles can be arranged, at some point patterns start repeating, even if we cannot detect them. The principle suggests that, in all likelihood, there are many other universes besides our own, coexisting in a kind of cosmic patchwork quilt. If we could look far enough, we would encounter other versions of ourselves actually, infinite versions. So all the possible experiments are already out there, its just a question of finding them and watching, Becker says. Hypothetically, a perfect map would facilitate all the questions astronomers have. Of course, we do not yet have the equipment to observe even a fraction of the universe we are in, never mind others.

In 1995, Becker surveyed 25% of the sky with a radio telescope array, making the galaxy accessible to astronomers through an image that was more accurate than those that previous arrays could provide. Though a quarter of the sky doesnt sound like much, it was such a monumental project that, along with the results, he published an image of his head superimposed on to Michelangelos Adam touching the hand of God. According to Becker, astronomers one day hope to have surveys like this from every part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Once you make an image, youll find a whole bunch of new phenomena. Every new survey opens new dimensions, he says and he means this literally.

In physics, Becker explains, most of what we take for granted today wasnt dreamed of 30 years ago. Its like science fiction dark matter, gravitational waves, quantum entanglement. Since he began mapping the sky, for example, we have learned to predict where black holes are through their gravitational pull if theyre orbiting a star, the star wobbles. Any time you talk about black holes, youre on the verge of science fiction, he says. Can you fall into a black hole and be transported across the universe? Some physicists dont think thats totally far-fetched. In much the same way that early explorers stretched the human imagination, astronomy continues to push the limits of our understanding of creation itself, requiring a kind of faith. As Becker notes, more data usually just gives rise to even more questions. In the outer reaches of even our own universe, Becker says, dragons are still there.

If you could somehow drain the seas, scientists predict you would see not sea monsters but a few volcanoes sprouting from an immense, flat floor, which is hundreds of thousands of hills covered by millennia of falling sediment. Because of these cloaking deposits, developing a better map of the ocean could shed light on the distant past. Its one of the most complete records of history on Earth, says Alan Mix, an oceanographer at Oregon State University. All of history accumulates in layers on the ocean floor. The problem is that this wealth of information lies submerged just out of reach. Because satellites cannot read through water, mapping the sea has been much more difficult than mapping land.

The joke, Mix says, is that we know more about the back side of the moon than the bottom of the ocean. In the meantime, we work with best guesses. On Google Earth, for example, the sea floor appears to be mapped, displaying mountain ranges and submerged islands, but these shapes are actually based on inferred data. Its an interpreted map, Mix explains. Because a mountain on the bottom of the ocean has a lot of mass, its gravity pulls on the water around it, causing a dip in the surface that a satellite can observe. But its like looking through a bad pair of glasses, Mix says. To really know whats going on below the surface, scientists must still send out an expedition.

Deep-sea submersibles, now the tool regularly used to map the ocean floor, were not invented until the 1930s. Their utility expanded with the ability to be operated remotely as an unmanned, robotic craft. In the 1980s, the US navy recruited the scientist Robert Ballard to push the limits of remote-controlled submersibles to find two nuclear submarines that had gone missing during the height of the cold war. They cloaked the top-secret mission as an attempt to find the Titanic which Ballard finally did, during the last 12 days of the expedition, using what he had learned while looking for the submarines. Since then, Ballards idea of deploying remote-controlled robots closer to the bottom of the sea has become standard practice. But the ocean is huge and submersibles can only travel so far. Even today, only about 17% of the ocean has been mapped with sonar, meaning that a ship or submersible has physically driven back and forth over the ocean floor in a grid, like mowing a lawn.

Still, as our knowledge of the ocean floor slowly expands, what scientists learn about ancient history could prove crucial for the future. Mix, for example, has spent the better part of a decade studying the bottom of the sea near the Petermann glacier, an enormous ice sheet on the north-west coast of Greenland, across the island from where Captain Siggi sails. Ice flows across bedrock as it melts and refreezes throughout the year, draining rivers off the Petermann glacier into the sea. The rate of Petermanns melt over the last five years has changed dramatically. (In 2012, an iceberg twice the size of Manhattan tore off the glacier.) Mix explains that the ice shelf acts like the flying buttress of a cathedral. The ice in the ocean helps hold ice back on land. So when it shrinks, its easier for the ice to go out into the ocean, catalysing the already increasing rate of melt.

To understand this process, first you have to make a map, Mix says, although making a map is more complicated when youre dodging bergs. To make his map, Mix sent an icebreaking ship as close as he dared to the glacier, using sonar signals to chart the glaciers historical path by recording the marks scraped like sandpaper on steroids along the bottom. Radiocarbon dating on samples suggests how fast the glacier once moved. These streams of information have been combined by Larry Mayer, director of the School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering at the University of New Hampshire, who developed a 3D visualisation tool for the expedition. Like a first-person-viewer video game, it takes all the data and turns it into an image like flying over the landscape on the seafloor, Mix says.

The new maps Mixs team have created suggest that actual change events [such as catastrophic ice melt] may happen on very human time scales. Civilisation is built on the assumption that tomorrow will be kind of like today. That has been true since the advent of agriculture. But if we do trigger the melting of ice sheets, it would change the system. Once that tipping point has been reached, the seas will rise so dramatically that for the next thousand years, humans would have to continuously move away from the ocean.

This summer, Mayer took his 3D visualisation tool on an icebreaker up to the Arctic as part of a project to map the ocean floor for the US government. Under the Law of the Sea treaty, Mayer explains, youre allowed to establish sovereign rights 200 nautical miles into the sea. But if the sea floor has certain morphological characteristics, the countrys territory can be extended beyond that 200 nautical-mile limit, into an area called the extended continental shelf. As the rush to claim the Arctic begins Russia has symbolically staked its claim to recently discovered oil reserves by planting a titanium flag in the bottom of the Arctic Ocean maps such as this will be a crucial part of the manoeuvring.

Even when not displaying contested territory, making a map is inherently political. Mapping a round thing in two dimensions is difficult: imagine flattening the unbroken peel of an orange and trying to connect the edges. In order to make a map, you have to give something up, says John Hessler. The decision of which variable to hold true distance or area or shape or scale is called a projection, and every one of them distorts the surface of the Earth in some capacity. The world maps you probably remember from school are Mercator projections, where Greenland appears larger than Africa a continent 14 times the islands size in order to preserve the accuracy of angles. In the 1960s, Arno Peter created a map that looks strangely elongated in comparison, preserving a more accurate sense of scale. Now called the Peters projection, he thought [it] had a better sense of equality for third world countries, Hessler explains. Since then, the number of potential projections has only expanded. Which distortion of the world works best depends on what you think is important.

On January 12, 2010, the epicentre of Haitis 7.0 magnitude earthquake registered just 15 miles from the countrys capital. By the time the aftershocks ceased, Port-au-Prince was left in ruins. Hundreds of thousands died, and many of the survivors had nowhere to go; 1.5 million people lost their homes overnight. Over the following days and weeks, healthcare workers and UN troops from around the world flocked to the country to aid those affected by the earthquake, bringing a strain of the cholera virus that ultimately triggered one of the worst epidemics in recent history.

Until then, Haiti was an epidemiologically naive population, an island with no previous encounter with this particular strain of cholera, and therefore possessing no innate resistance. There were many places that medical personnel were unable to reach. Where aid workers were able to estimate rates, 5% of the population contracted the disease, and without treatment, 40% of those patients died. Health centres struggled to keep up with the caseload, triaging people in tents. Those in acute stages of the illness lay in cots with holes cut in them and a bucket underneath.

Every patient that walked in, we asked them where they were from, recalls Ivan Gayton, the head of mission for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Haiti during the cholera outbreak. It may seem like common sense, but it wasnt until 1854 that doctors thought to map disease outbreaks. Like Haiti in 2010, London was suffering a severe cholera epidemic when a physician named John Snow plotted the addresses of cases on to a simple street map. He went door to door knocking, asked everyone where they were getting their water from, Gayton explains. When Snow saw the clusters, it became clear certain water pumps were spreading the disease. It was the foundational moment of epidemiology. It was a stunningly important moment in medicine, Gayton says. He was possibly one of the greatest physicians in all of history, and his claim to fame wasnt a new treatment or a drug it was making a map.

More than a century and a half later in Haiti, MSF doctors could not even do that. Though everyone being treated in Haitian clinics was asked where they were from, the information proved confounding, since none of the informal neighbourhoods and slums in Haiti were adequately mapped. Doctors lacked the ability to connect the place names with geographical coordinates. It was effectively being recorded in random syllables, Gayton says. Though staff tried to record cases in a spreadsheet, without locations, doctors could not tell if cases were adjacent to one another or on opposite sides of the city, making it difficult to trace or stop the sources of infection. We couldnt do our job, says Pete Masters, the Missing Maps project coordinator at MSF. We didnt have the evidence to take the best action.

At the peak of the outbreak, Gayton was wandering through the hallway of a clinic and spotted a colleague, Maya Allan, crouched on a windowsill with a laptop. She was trying to place pins [of cholera cases] on Google Earth by hand, Gayton says. Frustrated, he thought there had to be a better way. So he called Google, which was like calling the Batcave.

A few days later, Google software engineer Pablo Mayrgundter flew to Port-au-Prince, bringing with him Google Earth programs and map data downloaded on to hard drives so he could work in the field without the internet. He trained Haitians how to use GPS units, then sent them into neighbourhoods to get latitude and longitude coordinates for Haitian place names. Googles engineers were aided by a group called the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (Hot) team Earthquake nerds, looking at the TV, looking at the street map of Port-au-Prince, and realising theres nothing there, Masters says. After the earthquake, the group coordinated with members of the Haitian diaspora to map Haitis slums and identify local landmarks for the first time. Within 72 hours of the earthquake, search-and-rescue teams were using their maps. Together, Google and Hot worked to geolocate all of the information they had gathered and to write a script to import the case records. Suddenly, the MSF patient list could be transformed into an animated map of cases. Boom. All of a sudden, we could do what Snow did years ago, Gayton says. Hallelujah.

A couple of days after the Google team left, Gayton was able to pinpoint a water outage in a neighbourhood where cholera cases had suddenly jumped. After notifying the water utility, workers were dispatched to the site to make repairs. Fewer people were dying because a map allowed us to correlate a spike in cases to a specific event, Gayton says. Thats the holy grail of mapping actual lives saved.

Anyone who says the world is mapped, ask them to show you where Congo's population are living, where the villages are

Following the projects success in Haiti, Gayton was invited to MSF headquarters in London to try to set up a system for mapping other disasters. It didnt work, mainly because reactive mapping, it turns out, cant possibly keep up with the scale and speed of humanitarian disasters. Because of the horrible earthquake, HOT volunteer mapping got done [before the cholera crisis], Gayton says. A map that comes post-disaster doesnt save lives.

During the Ebola crisis in west Africa, cases moved too swiftly for maps to be created of all of the areas that the virus reached. What is needed is proactive mapping on a continental scale, of all vulnerable areas. Thats why Gayton helped coordinate Missing Maps, a collaboration between existing aid groups and volunteers using open-source data to map places where crises are likely to occur. The organisation holds mapathons, where volunteers connect to people in the field. Take names of streets, Gayton says. Youre on the Avenue of Church there are 200 of those in Lubumbashi. You have to trace it, have to have imagery, have to go into the field and get names, and then integrate all of that into a nice visual map. He describes the process as being similar to fitting a Russian doll together.

I like maps, Gayton says. But really what I care about is equitable distribution of healthcare. As long as 1 billion people dont have it, sooner or later itll come and bite people in rich countries. He scoffs at the idea that there are no blank spaces left on Earth. Anyone who says the world is mapped, ask them to show you where the population of Congo is living. Ask them where the villages are. If they can do it, please let me know.

To Gayton, its not an idle distinction. When you have a place like South Sudan, where millions of people live and die without ever figuring in a database anywhere, their names will never be written down. Theres not a lot of dignity in that to not be on the map is quite a powerful statement of uncaring.

Thats what Missing Maps is about. We still dont know who they are, but at least we know where their house is. At least the map actually contains them, rather than a blank wash of green, Gayton says. I tell people at mapathons sometimes, That house youre tracing right now, that hut thats the first time in the history of humanity someone cared enough about them to take note. Things dont exist just because we name them, but giving them a name engenders new meaning. At its most basic, to exist on a map is to have value.

It isnt coincidental that humans have been drawn to maps for almost as long as we have had written records.

Our best way of sharing knowledge whether its a physical representation of land or an energy space variable its a map, says Naoko Kurahashi Neilson. Every scientific analysis produces maps or visual plots to look at. Thats the way we intuitively understand the best.

By building narratives that orient us not only where we are physically standing, but in the past and future maps are an instinctual way of ordering chaos, of turning stars to constellations and glacial scratches to predictions. A map in the hands of a pilot is a testimony to a mans faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, wrote Beryl Markham in the 1940s, shortly after becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from the east to the west. A map says to you, Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.

The daughter of a colonial horse trainer, Markham grew up hunting barefoot with the Nandi, and learned to fly a plane when there were only a few in all of Africa. In early September 1936, Markham took off in a turquoise-and-silver Gull, with what she hoped was enough fuel to make it across the Atlantic. She flew for more than 21 hours across the open ocean, mostly in the dark. Recalling those interminable hours, she later wrote: Were all the maps in this world destroyed and vanished each man would be blind again, each city made a stranger to the next, each landmark become a meaningless signpost pointing to nothing.

Since Markhams record-breaking flight, weve sent a spaceship to the edge of the solar system. As technology shrinks the world, the concept of nothingness can feel obsolete; our very understanding of distance has fundamentally changed. But that doesnt mean small spaces can no longer be large enough to get lost in.

Several fjords over from Captain Siggis winter anchorage in Iceland, a pot-holed gravel road winds steeply up a mountain. Beyond the summit, a valley plunges into the sea. An Arctic fox pads silently downhill. Sheep graze over the moss and late blueberries. On the beach, waves eat away at the walls of an ancient sod-and-stone house. After generations of farmers ploughing a living into this stony plain, only a single woman, Betty, remains.

The road to her valley is closed for half the year; the rare visitor arrives only by snowmobile. Bettys TV cable went out two years ago, and the telephone doesnt work in the rain. She cares for the family church, where baptisms and deaths have been recorded for centuries, an imposition of will into a world that will exist without us. On winter nights when the northern lights come out, she piles on hand-knitted sweaters and stomps down to the beach to watch the sky perform.

The notion that place is capable of imparting its qualities to people may sound a little fanciful, writes geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, so let me say, first, something that is merely common sense, namely good soil yields good crops, bad soil poor crops. In humans, the phenomenon is subtle, but place just as surely moulds what used to be called character.

When Betty leaves the valley, these hills will be mapped, though no one will know their wind and their weather. Until then, when the sheep give birth in the spring, shell watch over the miracle. If one day the distant universe is as mundane as the road that leads to our doors, even in the most familiar, there will always be wonder. Its where all exploration begins.

Main photograph: Sean McDermott

This article is adapted from an essay published in the winter 2017 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review

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Faultlines, black holes and glaciers: mapping uncharted territories - The Guardian

Imagine a supercomputer so advanced that it could hold the contents of a human brain. The Google engineer Ray Kurzweil famously believes that this will be possible by 2045. Organized technologists are seeking to transfer human personalities to non-biological carriers, extending life, including to the point of immortality. My gut says that theyll never get there. But say Im wrong. Were it possible, would you upload the contents of your brain to a computer before death, extending your conscious moments on this earth indefinitely? Or would you die as your ancestors did, passing into nothingness or an unknown beyond human comprehension?

The promise of a radically extended lifespan, or even immortality, would tempt many. But it seems to me that theyd be risking something very much like hell on earth.

Their descendants might damn them to it.

* * *

Let us begin by noticing that justice, as most people presently conceive it, permits or even requires that at least some crimes be punished as far after the fact as is now possible. Take Hans Lipschis, who had far-exceeded his life expectancy by 2013, when the 93-year-old made headlines. He was living in southwestern Germany at the time. Police arrested him there. Prosecutors wanted to charge him with murders perpetrated seven decades prior. He had served as a guard at Auschwitz.

Now imagine an alternative scenario. Technology advances more quickly than expected; an elderly Holocaust perpetrator uploads his consciousness next year, before being found out; then, five or six years from now, evidence of his crimes comes to light. I suspect that a strong majority would favor punishing him for his mass-murdering, and would quickly settle on some alternative to physical incarceration. Perhaps the consciousness would be denied new information, or the ability to interact with others; or perhaps there would be some degree of torment inflicted.

For how long?

With the consciousness of Adolf Hitler in our possession, 6 million years of disembodied punishment would still constitute just one year for every murdered Jew.

Yet Ghengis Khan, who perpetrated all manner of atrocity less than a millenia ago, would inspire some sympathy, I think, if it were discovered that his contemporaries had imprisoned his consciousness upon his death as punishment for mass murder. Were he discovered in mental chains after eight centuries of suffering, there would be demands for his release and debates about applying morality across time. And utilitarians would debate the consequences of his military victories across the centuries. Perhaps hed be freed due to his unfathomably long punishment and the fact that his victims seem so remote to us. Or maybe hed be forgotten in prison, as is done to so many individuals in our existing system.

These are wild thought experiments, but with them I only mean to illustrate a narrow point: Radical life extension would so scramble and confound our normal notions of justice that theres no telling how future Americans would react to the new reality. Historic monsters might be punished for 6 million years or just three or four times longer than a 150-year sentence a U.S. court imposed on this obscure money-launderer. Its hard to speculate even when confining ourselves to descendants of ours, in this country, with moral codes closely resembling our own.

In fact, it isnt clear how wed react right now.

If todays Americans magically took custody of servers containing the disembodied consciousnesses of every figure ever mentioned in the countrys newspapers, going back to the beginning, would we stop at punishing former Nazi leaders? Would there be a protest movement to hold Native American killers and slaveholders accountable? What about the folks behind the Tuskegee syphilis experiment? Or the city leaders of towns in the Jim Crow South that subjugated blacks?

Answering as a thought experiment is comparatively easy.

Future Americans will face countless actual controversies just like those if whole generations start uploading themselves. And it isnt outlandish to imagine futures where the masses look at us with the disdain that we have for Bull Connor and his analogs. Perhaps the Americans of 2215, with their laboratory-grown synthetic meat, will look in horror at those of us who had animals killed throughout our lives in order to eat them. Maybe theyll regard a years punishment per animal killed to be fair, with a 10-year enhancement for animals kept in cruel conditions before death.

Maybe everyone in the fossil-fuel era will be condemned to punishments corresponding in length to the years of destruction that we wrought on a fragile planet.

Perhaps people who had abortions, or people who bore more than two children, will find themselves in disfavor. Perhaps an ISIS-like brand of sharia law will prevail, and most everyone who uploaded their consciousness in the West will be tortured for a millennia, until the course of history changes and new rulers take control.

Of course, its possible that future generations will be less punitive than I imagine. But will that last forever? In any case, humans will be forced to make a decision about whether to upload their consciousnesses before knowing what the far future holds.

Admittedly, the living dont know the near future even today.

Nuclear war could come tomorrow. Those of us who survive it might spend the rest of our days in misery. But that misery would be relatively short. Radical life extension via mind uploads would seem to risk inconceivably long, possibly endless misery. And this holds even if no future generation deliberately inflicts that misery.

Its hard to imagine a civilization of highly adept network administrators who manage, century after century, to maintain uncorrupted data and functioning equipment.

But maybe theyll excel.

So let us imagine inconceivably durable hardware that holds a human consciousness. This computer is attached to a generator that runs off of nuclear waste as it decays. Thus it is deep in a vault in the earth, but attached to the rest of humanity via cables. For 100 years, the disembodied mind revels in all she can explore: the sum of human knowledge; every other uploaded consciousness; and this universe of diverting data just keeps expanding with every day.

Then a super-volcano explodes.

All embodied human life is extinguished. Most disembodied life is destroyed too. But not the computer deep in the bunker of nuclear waste. Its connections to other computers have been severed. But the consciousness endures with nothing stored locally save the original upload and McAfee anti-virus software that no one could figure out how to uninstall. As time wears on, this human endures the long twilight of the species on earth: 15.7 million years imprisoned with herself until the Iodine-I29 powering her computer is exhausted. As they say, What a way to go!

Strange as it may seem, the most important hedge for those seeking immortality just might be declining radical life extension unless theyre assured a suicide switch.

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Immortal but Damned to Hell on Earth - The Atlantic

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In transhumanism and science fiction, mind uploading (also occasionally referred to by other terms such as mind transfer, whole brain emulation, or whole body emulation) refers to the hypothetical transfer of a human mind to a substrate different from a biological brain, such as a detailed computer simulation of an individual human brain.

The human brain contains a little more than 100 billion nerve cells called neurons, each individually linked to other neurons by way of connectors called axons and dendrites. Signals at the junctures (synapses) of these connections are transmitted by the release and detection of chemicals known as neurotransmitters. The brain contains cell types other than neurons (such as glial cells), some of which are structurally similar to neurons, but the information processing of the brain is thought to be conducted by the network of neurons.

Current biomedical and neuropsychological thinking is that the human mind is a product of the information processing of this neural network. To use an analogy from computer science, if the neural network of the brain can be thought of as hardware, then the human mind is the software running on it.

Mind uploading, then, is the act of copying or transferring this "software" from the hardware of the human brain to another processing environment, typically an artificially created one.

The concept of mind uploading then is strongly mechanist, relying on several assumptions about the nature of human consciousness and the philosophy of artificial intelligence. It assumes that strong AI machine intelligence is not only possible, but is indistinguishable from human intelligence, and denies the vitalist view of human life and consciousness.

Mind uploading is completely speculative at this point in time; no technology exists which can accomplish this.

The relationship between the human mind and the neural circuitry of the brain is currently poorly understood. Thus, most theoretical approaches to mind uploading are based on the idea of recreating or simulating the underlying neural network. This approach would theoretically eliminate the need to understand how such a system works if the component neurons and their connections can be simulated with enough accuracy.

It is unknown how precise the simulation of such a neural network would have to be to produce a functional simulation of the brain. It is possible, however, that simulating the functions of a human brain at the cellular level might be much more difficult than creating a human level artificial intelligence, which relied on recreating the functions of the human mind, rather than trying to simulate the underlying biological systems.[citation needed]

Thinkers with a strongly mechanistic view of human intelligence (such as Marvin Minsky) or a strongly positive view of robot-human social integration (such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil) have openly speculated about the possibility and desirability of this.

In the case where the mind is transferred into a computer, the subject would become a form of artificial intelligence, sometimes called an infomorph or "nomorph." In a case where it is transferred into an artificial body, to which its consciousness is confined, it would also become a robot. In either case it might claim ordinary human rights, certainly if the consciousness within was feeling (or was doing a good job of simulating) as if it were the donor.

Uploading consciousness into bodies created by robotic means is a goal of some in the artificial intelligence community. In the uploading scenario, the physical human brain does not move from its original body into a new robotic shell; rather, the consciousness is assumed to be recorded and/or transferred to a new robotic brain, which generates responses indistinguishable from the original organic brain.

The idea of uploading human consciousness in this manner raises many philosophical questions which people may find interesting or disturbing, such as matters of individuality and the soul. Vitalists would say that uploading was a priori impossible. Many people also wonder whether, if they were uploaded, it would be their sentience uploaded, or simply a copy.

Even if uploading is theoretically possible, there is currently no technology capable of recording or describing mind states in the way imagined, and no one knows how much computational power or storage would be needed to simulate the activity of the mind inside a computer. On the other hand, advocates of uploading have made various estimates of the amount of computing power that would be needed to simulate a human brain, and based on this a number have estimated that uploading may become possible within decades if trends such as Moore's Law continue.[citation needed]

If it is possible for human minds to be modeled and treated as software objects which can be instanced multiple times, in multiple processing environments, many potentially desirable possibilities open up for the individual.

If the mental processes of the human mind can be disassociated from its original biological body, it is no longer tied to the limits and lifespan of that body. In theory, a mind could be voluntarily copied or transferred from body to body indefinitely and therefore become immortal, or at least exercise conscious control of its lifespan.

Alternatively, if cybernetic implants could be used to monitor and record the structure of the human mind in real time then, should the body of the individual be killed, such implants could be used to later instance another working copy of that mind. It is also possible that periodic backups of the mind could be taken and stored external to the body and a copy of the mind instanced from this backup, should the body (and possibly the implants) be lost or damaged beyond recovery. In the latter case, any changes and experiences since the time of the last backup would be lost.

Such possibilities have been explored extensively in fiction: This Number Speaks, Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, Newton's Gate, John Varley's Eight Worlds series, Greg Egan's Permutation City, Diaspora, Schild's Ladder and Incandescence, the Revelation Space series, Peter Hamilton's Pandora's Star duology, Bart Kosko's Fuzzy Time, Armitage III series, the Takeshi Kovacs universe, Iain M. Banks Culture novels, Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and the works of Charles Stross. And in television sci-fi shows: Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, among others.

Another concept explored in science fiction is the idea of more than one running "copy" of a human mind existing at once. Such copies could either be full copies, or limited subsets of the complete mentality designed for a particular limited functions. Such copies would allow an "individual" to experience many things at once, and later integrate the experiences of all copies into a central mentality at some point in the future, effectively allowing a single sentient being to "be many places at once" and "do many things at once".

The implications of such entities have been explored in science fiction. In his book Eon, Greg Bear uses the terms "partials" and "ghosts", while Charles Stross's novels Accelerando and Glasshouse deal with the concepts of "forked instances" of conscious beings as well as "backups".

In Charles Sheffield's Tomorrow and Tomorrow, the protagonist's consciousness is duplicated thousands of times electronically and sent out on probe ships and uploaded into bodies adapted to native environments of different planets. The copies are eventually reintegrated back into the "master" copy of the consciousness in order to consolidate their findings.

Such partial and complete copies of a sentient being again raise issues of identity and personhood: is a partial copy of sentient being itself sentient? What rights might such a being have? Since copies of a personality are having different experiences, are they not slowly diverging and becoming different entities? At what point do they become different entities?

If the body and the mind of the individual can be disassociated, then the individual is theoretically free to choose their own incarnation. They could reside within a completely human body, within a modified physical form, or within simulated realities. Individuals might change their incarnations many times during their existence, depending on their needs and desires.

Choices of the individuals in this matter could be restricted by the society they exist within, however. In the novel Eon by Greg Bear, individuals could incarnate physically (within "natural" biological humans, or within modified bodies) a limited number of times before being legally forced to reside with the "city memory" as infomorphic "ghosts".

Once an individual is moved to virtual simulation, the only input needed would be energy, which would be provided by large computing device hosting those minds. All the food, drink, moving, travel or any imaginable thing would just need energy to provide those computations.

Almost all scientists, thinkers and intelligent people would be moved to this virtual environment once they die. In this virtual environment, their brain capacity would be expanded by speed and storage of quantum computers. In virtual environment idea and final product are not different. This way more and more innovations will be sent to real world and it will speed up our technological development.

Regardless of the techniques used to capture or recreate the function of a human mind, the processing demands of such venture are likely to be immense.

Henry Markram, lead researcher of the "Blue Brain Project", has stated that "it is not [their] goal to build an intelligent neural network", based solely on the computational demands such a project would have[1].

Advocates of mind uploading point to Moore's law to support the notion that the necessary computing power may become available within a few decades, though it would probably require advances beyond the integrated circuit technology which has dominated since the 1970s. Several new technologies have been proposed, and prototypes of some have been demonstrated, such as the optical neural network based on the silicon-photonic chip (harnessing special physical properties of Indium Phosphide) which Intel showed the world for the first time on September 18, 2006.[3] Other proposals include three-dimensional integrated circuits based on carbon nanotubes (researchers have already demonstrated individual logic gates built from carbon nanotubes[4]) and also perhaps the quantum computer, currently being worked on internationally as well as most famously by computer scientists and physicists at the IBM Almaden Research Center, which promises to be useful in simulating the behavior of quantum systems; such ability would enable protein structure prediction which could be critical to correct emulation of intracellular neural processes.

Present methods require use of massive computational power (as the BBP does with IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer) to use the essentially classical computing architecture for serial deduction of the quantum mechanical processes involved in ab initio protein structure prediction. If necessary, should the quantum computer become a reality, its capacity for exactly such rapid calculations of quantum mechanical physics may well help the effort by reducing the required computational power per physical size and energy needs, as Markram warns would be needed (and thus why he thinks it would be difficult, besides unattractive) should an entire brain's simulation, let alone emulation (at both cellular and molecular levels) be feasibly attempted. Reiteration may also be useful for distributed simulation of a common, repeated function (e.g., proteins).

Ultimately, nano-computing is projected by some[citation needed] to hold the requisite capacity for computations per second estimated necessary, in surplus. If Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (a variation on Moore's Law) shows itself to be true, the rate of technological development should accelerate exponentially towards the technological singularity, heralded by the advent of viable though relatively primitive mind uploading and/or "strong" (human-level) AI technologies, his prediction being that the Singularity may occur around the year 2045.[5]

The structure of a neural network is also different from classical computing designs. Memory in a classical computer is generally stored in a two state design, or bit, although one of the two components is modified in dynamic RAM and some forms of flash memory can use more than two states under some circumstances. Gates inside central processing units will often also use this two state or digital type of design as well. In some ways a neural network or brain could be thought of like a memory unit in a computer, but with an extremely vast number of states, corresponding with the total number of neurons. Beyond that, whether the action potential of a neuron will form, based upon the summation of the inputs of different dendrites, might be something that is more analog in nature than that which happens in a computer. One great advantage that a modern computer has over a biological brain, however, is that the speed of each electronic operation in a computer is many orders of magnitude faster than the time scales involved for the firing and transmission of individual nerve impulses. A brain, however, uses far more parallel processing than exists in most classical computing designs, and so each of the slower neurons can make up for it by operating at the same time.

There are many ethical issues concerning mind uploading. Viable mind uploading technology might challenge the ideas of human immortality, property rights, capitalism, human intelligence, an afterlife, and the Abrahamic view of man as created in God's image. These challenges often cannot be distinguished from those raised by all technologies that extend human technological control over human bodies, e.g. organ transplant. Perhaps the best way to explore such issues is to discover principles applicable to current bioethics problems, and question what would be permissible if they were applied consistently to a future technology. This points back to the role of science fiction in exploring such problems, as powerfully demonstrated in the 20th century by such works as Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, each of which frame current ethical problems in a future environment where those have come to dominate the society.

Another issue with mind uploading is whether an uploaded mind is really the "same" sentience, or simply an exact copy with the same memories and personality. Although this difference would be undetectable to an external observer (and the upload itself would probably be unable to tell), it could mean that uploading a mind would actually kill it and replace it with a clone. Some people would be unwilling to upload themselves for this reason. If their sentience is deactivated even for a nanosecond, they assert, it is permanently wiped out. Some more gradual methods may avoid this problem by keeping the uploaded sentience functioning throughout the procedure.

True mind uploading remains speculative. The technology to perform such a feat is not currently available, however a number of possible mechanisms, and research approaches, have been proposed for developing mind uploading technology.

Since the function of the human mind, and how it might arise from the working of the brain's neural network, are poorly understood issues, many theoretical approaches to mind uploading rely on the idea of emulation. Rather than having to understand the functioning of the human mind, the structure of underlying neural network is captured and simulated with a computer system. The human mind then, theoretically, is generated by the simulated neural network in an identical fashion to it being generated by the biological neural network.

These approaches require only that we understand the nature of neurons and how their connections function, that we can simulate them well enough, that we have the computational power to run such large simulations, and that the state of the brain's neural network can be captured with enough fidelity to create an accurate simulation.

A possible method for mind uploading is serial sectioning, in which the brain tissue and perhaps other parts of the nervous system are frozen and then scanned and analyzed layer by layer, thus capturing the structure of the neurons and their interconnections[6]. The exposed surface of frozen nerve tissue would be scanned (possibly with some variant of an electron microscope) and recorded, and then the surface layer of tissue removed (possibly with a conventional cryo-ultramicrotome if scanning along an axis, or possibly through laser ablation if scans are done radially "from the outside inwards"). While this would be a very slow and labor intensive process, research is currently underway to automate the collection and microscopy of serial sections[7]. The scans would then be analyzed, and a model of the neural net recreated in the system that the mind was being uploaded into.

There are uncertainties with this approach using current microscopy techniques. If it is possible to replicate neuron function from its visible structure alone, then the resolution afforded by a scanning electron microscope would suffice for such a technique[7]. However, as the function of brain tissue is partially determined by molecular events (particularly at synapses, but also at other places on the neuron's cell membrane), this may not suffice for capturing and simulating neuron functions. It may be possible to extend the techniques of serial sectioning and to capture the internal molecular makeup of neurons, through the use of sophisticated immunohistochemistry staining methods which could then be read via confocal laser scanning microscopy[citation needed].

A more advanced hypothetical technique that would require nanotechnology might involve infiltrating the intact brain with a network of nanoscale machines to "read" the structure and activity of the brain in situ, much like the electrode meshes used in current brain-computer interface research, but on a much finer and more sophisticated scale. The data collected from these probes could then be used to build up a simulation of the neural network they were probing, and even check the behavior of the model against the behavior of the biological system in real time.

In his 1998 book, Mind children, Hans Moravec describes a variation of this process. In it, nanomachines are placed in the synapses of the outer layer of cells in the brain of a conscious living subject. The system then models the outer layer of cells and recreates the neural net processes in whatever simulation space is being used to house the uploaded consciousness of the subject. The nanomachines can then block the natural signals sent by the biological neurons, but send and receive signals to and from the simulated versions of the neurons. Which system is doing the processing biological or simulated can be toggled back and forth, both automatically by the scanning system and manually by the subject, until it has been established that the simulation's behavior matches that of the biological neurons and that the subjective mental experience of the subject is unchanged. Once this is the case, the outer layer of neurons can be removed and their function turned solely over to the simulated neurons. This process is then repeated, layer by layer, until the entire biological brain of the subject has been scanned, modeled, checked, and disassembled. When the process is completed, the nanomachines can be removed from the spinal column of the subject, and the mind of the subject exists solely within the simulated neural network.

Alternatively, such a process might allow for the replacement of living neurons with artificial neurons one by one while the subject is still conscious, providing a smooth transition from an organic to synthetic brain - potentially significant for those who worry about the loss of personal continuity that other uploading processes may entail. This method has been likened to upgrading the whole internet by replacing, one by one, each computer connected to it with similar computers using newer hardware.

While many people are more comfortable with the idea of the gradual replacement of their natural selves than they are with some of the more radical and discontinuous mental transfer, it still raises questions of identity. Is the individual preserved in this process, and if not, at what point does the individual cease to exist? If the original entity ceases to exist, what is the nature and identity of the individual created within the simulated neural network, or can any individual be said to exist there at all? This gradual replacement leads to a much more complicated and sophisticated version of the Ship of Theseus paradox.

It may also be possible to use advanced neuroimaging technology (such as Magnetoencephalography) to build a detailed three-dimensional model of the brain using non-invasive and non-destructive methods. However, current imaging technology lacks the resolution needed to gather the information needed for such a scan.

Such a process would leave the original entity intact, but the existence, nature, and identity of the resulting being in the simulated network are still open philosophical questions.

Another recently conceived possibility[citation needed] is the use of genetically engineered viruses to attach to synaptic junctions, and then release energy-emitting molecular compounds, which could be detected externally, and used to generate a functional model of the synapses in question, and, given enough time, the whole brain and nervous system.

An alternate set of possible theoretical approaches to mind uploading would require that we first understand the functions of the human mind sufficiently well to create abstract models of parts, or the totality, of human mental processes. It would require that strong AI be not only a possibility, but that the techniques used to create a strong AI system could also be used to recreate a human type mentality.

Such approaches might be more desirable if the abstract models required less computational power to execute than the neural network simulation of the emulation techniques described above.

Another theoretically possible method of mind uploading from organic to inorganic medium, related to the idea described above of replacing neurons one at a time while consciousness remained intact, would be a much less precise but much more feasible (in terms of technology currently known to be physically possible) process of "cyborging". Once a given person's brain is mapped, it is replaced piece-by-piece with computer devices which perform the exact same function as the regions preceding them, after which the patient is allowed to regain consciousness and validate that there has not been some radical upheaval within his own subjective experience of reality. At this point, the patient's brain is immediately "re-mapped" and another piece is replaced, and so on in this fashion until, the patient exists on a purely hardware medium and can be safely extricated from the remaining organic body.

However, critics contend[citation needed] that, given the significant level of synergy involved throughout the neural plexus, alteration of any given cell that is functionally correspondent with (a) neighboring cell(s) may well result in an alteration of its electrical and chemical properties that would not have existed without interference, and so the true individual's signature is lost. Revokability of that disturbance may be possible with damage anticipation and correction (seeing the original by the particular damage rendered unto it, in reverse chronological fashion), although this would be easier in a stable system, meaning a brain subjected to cryosleep (which would imbue its own damage and alterations).[citation needed]

It has also been suggested (for example, in Greg Egan's "jewelhead" stories[8]) that a detailed examination of the brain itself may not be required, that the brain could be treated as a black box instead and effectively duplicated "for all practical purposes" by merely duplicating how it responds to specific external stimuli. This leads into even deeper philosophical questions of what the "self" is.

On June 6, 2005 IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne announced the launch of a project to build a complete simulation of the human brain, entitled the "Blue Brain Project".[9] The project will use a supercomputer based on IBM's Blue Gene design to map the entire electrical circuitry of the brain. The project seeks to research aspects of human cognition, and various psychiatric disorders caused by malfunctioning neurons, such as autism. Initial efforts are to focus on experimentally accurate, programmed characterization of a single neocortical column in the brain of a rat, as it is very similar to that of a human but at a smaller scale, then to expand to an entire neocortex (the alleged seat of higher intelligence) and eventually the human brain as a whole.

It is interesting to note that the Blue Brain project seems to use a combination of emulation and simulation techniques. The first stage of their program was to simulate a neocortical column at the molecular level. Now the program seems to be trying to create a simplified functional simulation of the neocortical column in order to simulate many of them, and to model their interactions.

With most projected mind uploading technology it is implicit that "copying" a consciousness could be as feasible as "moving" it, since these technologies generally involve simulating the human brain in a computer of some sort, and digital files such as computer programs can be copied precisely. It is also possible that the simulation could be created without the need to destroy the original brain, so that the computer-based consciousness would be a copy of the still-living biological person, although some proposed methods such as serial sectioning of the brain would necessarily be destructive. In both cases it is usually assumed that once the two versions are exposed to different sensory inputs, their experiences would begin to diverge, but all their memories up until the moment of the copying would remain the same.

By many definitions, both copies could be considered the "same person" as the single original consciousness before it was copied. At the same time, they can be considered distinct individuals once they begin to diverge, so the issue of which copy "inherits" what could be complicated. This problem is similar to that found when considering the possibility of teleportation, where in some proposed methods it is possible to copy (rather than only move) a mind or person. This is the classic philosophical issue of personal identity. The problem is made even more serious by the possibility of creating a potentially infinite number of initially identical copies of the original person, which would of course all exist simultaneously as distinct beings.

Philosopher John Locke published "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" in 1689, in which he proposed the following criterion for personal identity: if you remember thinking something in the past, then you are the same person as he or she who did the thinking. Later philosophers raised various logical snarls, most of them caused by applying Boolean logic, the prevalent logic system at the time. It has been proposed that modern fuzzy logic can solve those problems,[10] showing that Locke's basic idea is sound if one treats personal identity as a continuous rather than discrete value.

In that case, when a mind is copied -- whether during mind uploading, or afterwards, or by some other means -- the two copies are initially two instances of the very same person, but over time, they will gradually become different people to an increasing degree.

The issue of copying vs moving is sometimes cited as a reason to think that destructive methods of mind uploading such as serial sectioning of the brain would actually destroy the consciousness of the original and the upload would itself be a mere "copy" of that consciousness. Whether one believes that the original consciousness of the brain would transfer to the upload, that the original consciousness would be destroyed, or that this is simply a matter of definition and the question has no single "objectively true" answer, is ultimately a philosophical question that depends on one's views of philosophy of mind.

Because of these philosophical questions about the survival of consciousness, there are some who would feel more comfortable about a method of uploading where the transfer is gradual, replacing the original brain with a new substrate over an extended period of time, during which the subject appears to be fully conscious (this can be seen as analogous to the natural biological replacement of molecules in our brains with new ones taken in from eating and breathing, which may lead to almost all the matter in our brains being replaced in as little as a few months[11]). As mentioned above, this would likely take place as a result of gradual cyborging, either nanoscopically or macroscopically, wherein the brain (the original copy) would slowly be replaced bit by bit with artificial parts that function in a near-identical manner, and assuming this was possible at all, the person would not necessarily notice any difference as more and more of their brain became artificial. A gradual transfer also brings up questions of identity similar to the classical Ship of Theseus paradox, although the above-mentioned natural replacement of molecules in the brain through eating and breathing brings up these questions as well.

A computer capable of simulating a person may require microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), or else perhaps optical or nano computing for comparable speed and reduced size and sophisticated telecommunication between the brain and body (whether it exists in virtual reality, artificially as an android, or cybernetically as in sync with a biological body through a transceiver), but would not seem to require molecular nanotechnology.

If minds and environments can be simulated, the Simulation Hypothesis posits that the reality we see may in fact be a computer simulation, and that this is actually the most likely possibility.[12]

Uploading is a common theme in science fiction. Some of the earlier instances of this theme were in the Roger Zelazny 1968 novel Lord of Light and in Frederik Pohl's 1955 short story "Tunnel Under the World." A near miss was Neil R. Jones' 1931 short story "The Jameson Satellite", wherein a person's organic brain was installed in a machine, and Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First Men" (1930) had organic human-like brains grown into an immobile machine.

Another of the "firsts" is the novel Detta r verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the renowned philosopher and logician Bertil Mrtensson, in which he describes people living in an uploaded state as a means to control overpopulation. The uploaded people believe that they are "alive", but in reality they are playing elaborate and advanced fantasy games. In a twist at the end, the author changes everything into one of the best "multiverse" ideas of science fiction. Together with the 1969 book Ubik by Philip K. Dick it takes the subject to its furthest point of all the early novels in the field.

Frederik Pohl's Gateway series (also known as the Heechee Saga) deals with a human being, Robinette Broadhead, who "dies" and, due to the efforts of his wife, a computer scientist, as well as the computer program Sigfrid von Shrink, is uploaded into the "64 Gigabit space" (now archaic, but Fred Pohl wrote Gateway in 1976). The Heechee Saga deals with the physical, social, sexual, recreational, and scientific nature of cyberspace before William Gibson's award-winning Neuromancer, and the interactions between cyberspace and "meatspace" commonly depicted in cyberpunk fiction. In Neuromancer, a hacking tool used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a notorious cyber-criminal, Dixie Flatline. The infomorph only assists in exchange for the promise that he be deleted after the mission is complete.

In the 1982 novel Software, part of the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, one of the main characters, Cobb Anderson, has his mind uploaded and his body replaced with an extremely human-like android body. The robots who persuade Anderson into doing this sell the process to him as a way to become immortal.

In the 1997 novel "Shade's Children" by Garth Nix, one of the main characters Shade (a.k.a. Robert Ingman) is an uploaded consciousness that guides the other characters through the post-apocolyptic world in which they live.

The fiction of Greg Egan has explored many of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and identity aspects of mind uploading, as well as the financial and computing aspects (i.e., hardware, software, processing power) of maintaining "copies". In Egan's Permutation City and Diaspora, "copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain physiology. Also, in Egan's "Jewelhead" stories, the mind is transferred from the organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer at the base of the skull, with the organic brain then being surgically removed.

The Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan was set in a universe where mind transfers were a part of standard life. With the use of cortical stacks, which record a person's memories and personality into a device implanted in the spinal vertebrae, it was possible to copy the individual's mind to a storage system at the time of death. The stack could be uploaded to a virtual reality environment for interrogation, entertainment, or to pass the time for long distance travel. The stack could also be implanted into a new body or "sleeve" which may or may not have biomechanical, genetic, or chemical "upgrades" since the sleeve could be grown or manufactured. Interstellar travel is most often accomplished by digitized human freight ("dhf") over faster-than-light needlecast transmission.

In the "Requiem for Homo Sapiens" series of novels by David Zindell (Neverness, The Broken God, The Wild, and War in Heaven), the verb "cark" is used for uploading one's mind (and also for changing one's DNA). Carking is done for soul-preservation purposes by the members of the Architects church, and also for more sinister (or simply unknowable) purposes by the various "gods" that populate the galaxy such gods being human minds that have now grown into planet- or nebula-sized synthetic brains. The climax of the series centers around the struggle to prevent one character from creating a Universal Computer (under his control) that will incorporate all human minds (and indeed, the entire structure of the universe).

In the popular computer game Total Annihilation, the 4,000-year war that eventually culminated with the destruction of the Milky Way galaxy was started over the issue of mind transfer, with one group (the Arm) resisting another group (the Core) who were attempting to enforce a 100% conversion rate of humanity into machines, because machines are durable and modular, thereby making it a "public health measure."

In the popular science fiction show Stargate SG-1 the alien race who call themselves the Asgard rely solely on cloning and mind transferring to continue their existence. This was not a choice they made, but a result of the decay of the Asgard genome due to excessive cloning, which also caused the Asgard to lose their ability to reproduce. In the episode "Tin Man", SG-1 encounter Harlan, the last of a race that transferred their minds to robots in order to survive. SG-1 then discover that their minds have also been transferred to robot bodies. Eventually they learn that their minds were copied rather than uploaded and that the "original" SG-1 are still alive.

The Thirteenth Floor is a film made in 1999 directed by Josef Rusnak. In the film, a scientific team discovers a technology to create a fully functioning virtual world which they could experience by taking control of the bodies of simulated characters in the world, all of whom were self-aware. One plot twist was that if the virtual body a person had taken control of was killed in the simulation while they were controlling it, then the mind of the simulated character the body originally belonged to would take over the body of that person in the "real world".

The Matrix is a film released the same year as The Thirteenth Floor that has the same kind of solipsistic philosophy. In The Matrix, the protagonist Neo finds out that the world he has been living in is nothing but a simulated dreamworld. However, this should be considered as virtual reality rather than mind uploading, since Neo's physical brain still is required to reside his mind. The mind (the information content of the brain) is not copied into an emulated brain in a computer. Neo's physical brain is connected into the Matrix via a brain-machine interface. Only the rest of the physical body is simulated. Neo is disconnected from this dreamworld by human rebels fighting against AI-driven machines in what seems to be a neverending war. During the course of the movie, Neo and his friends are connected back into the Matrix dreamworld in order to fight the machine race.

In the series Battlestar Galactica the antagonists of the story are the Cylons, sentient computers created by man which developed to become nearly identical to human beings. When they die they rely on mind transferring to keep on living so that "death becomes a learning experience".

The 1995 movie Strange Days explores the idea of a technology capable of recording a conscious event. However, in this case, the mind itself is not uploaded into the device. The recorded event, which time frame is limited to that of the recording session, is frozen in time on a data disc much like today's audio and video. Wearing the "helmet" in playback mode, another person can experience the external stimuli interpretation of the brain, the memories, the feelings, the thoughts and the actions that the original person recorded from his/her life. During playback, the observer temporarily quits his own memories and state of consciousness (the real self). In other words, one can "live" a moment in the life of another person, and one can "live" the same moment of his/her life more than once. In the movie, a direct link to a remote helmet can also be established, allowing another person to experience a live event.

Followers of the Ralian religion advocate mind uploading in the process of human cloning to achieve eternal life. Living inside of a computer is also seen by followers as an eminent possibility.[13]

However, mind uploading is also advocated by a number of secular researchers in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, such as Marvin Minsky. In 1993, Joe Strout created a small web site called the Mind Uploading Home Page, and began advocating the idea in Cryonics circles and elsewhere on the net. That site has not been actively updated in recent years, but it has spawned other sites including MindUploading.org, run by Randal A. Koene, Ph.D., who also moderates a mailing list on the topic. These advocates see mind uploading as a medical procedure which could eventually save countless lives.

Many Transhumanists look forward to the development and deployment of mind uploading technology, with many predicting that it will become possible within the 21st century due to technological trends such as Moore's Law. Many view it as the end phase of the Transhumanist project, which might be said to begin with the genetic engineering of biological humans, continue with the cybernetic enhancement of genetically engineered humans, and finally obtain with the replacement of all remaining biological aspects.

The book Beyond Humanity: CyberEvolution and Future Minds by Gregory S. Paul & Earl D. Cox, is about the eventual (and, to the authors, almost inevitable) evolution of computers into sentient beings, but also deals with human mind transfer.

Raymond Kurzweil, a prominent advocate of transhumanism and the likelihood of a technological singularity, has suggested that the easiest path to human-level artificial intelligence may lie in "reverse-engineering the human brain", which he usually uses to refer to the creation of a new intelligence based on the general "principles of operation" of the brain, but he also sometimes uses the term to refer to the notion of uploading individual human minds based on highly detailed scans and simulations. This idea is discussed on pp. 198-203 of his book The Singularity is Near, for example.

Hans Moravec describes and advocates mind uploading in both his 1988 book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence and also his 2000 book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Moravec is referred to by Marvin Minsky in Minsky's essay Will Robots Inherit the Earth?.[14]

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