March 2018 | IT Assist

Silicon Valley Billionaire Sam Altman Is Paying $10k For His Brain To Be Uploaded Online

I know what you are thinking, sounds great for Sam Altman? well not entirely as the process and preparations will inevitably end the billionaires life so that his brain can be uploaded.

Altman who is only 32 is currently on a 25 person waiting list at the start up company Nectome who are the ones promising that they can upload human brains to a cloud. The procedure is known as ‘eternal preservation’ and will require him to go out in a process similar to physician assisted-suicide.

The companies co-founders are aiming to preserve brains down to the last microscopic detail thanks to a high-tech embalming process. The process requires your brain to be turned in to glass, but the company uses the term vitrifixed.

The whole process could be very useful for people who are suffering from terminal illness and want there brain to be preserved forever. Sam Altman said recently: “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud. There is a lot of philosophical debate, but to me a simulation is close enough that it’s worth something. And there is a much larger humanitarian aspect to the whole thing. Right now, when a generation of people die, we lose all their collective wisdom. You can transmit knowledge to the next generation, but it’s harder to transmit wisdom, which is learned. Your children have to learn from the same mistakes.
That was fine for a while, but we get more powerful every generation. The sheer immense potential of what we can do increases, but the wisdom does not.”

The company made it’s intentions clear after the Co-founders spent several weeks staying in an AirBnb in Oregon, to buy the body of an elderly woman, they managed to preserve her brain after just 2.5 hours which means that even though the tactics they use may be very creepy, they still know what they are doing!

Would you ever consider having your brain “turned to glass” and upload to cloud so that it may live on forever, or do you feel like it is too strange?

NASA’s New Plan To Put A Submarine Into An Ocean On Saturn’s Moon

Throughout the past few years, everyone has been asking the same question, which is ‘Is there life on Mars?’, but it seems NASA is taking initiative, but on a huge body of water on the moon of Jupiter’s surface. This ocean was discovered recently by the Cassini space probe and named the Kraken Mare, this should be one hell of a job for a submarine as the ocean has a reported size of 400,000km2, but with NASA recently finding the perfect automated submarine for this job, the plan seems to have been given the green light.

I know you might be sat thinking, what’s so great about the Kraken Mare which would make them want to explore it? Well it is the only location in our solar system where surface liquids have been found, which holds a much higher chance of alien life, but the fact that the rivers & lakes on the moon are all mixed with methane & ethane which means that if aliens are living in on the moon, they must either be very strong or must have evolved to be tolerant of the gases.

The plan is to have the submarine land in the most northern part of the ocean which would allow NASA to get as much information as possible about the inner workings of the moon which provides them with more knowledge.

A website for the mission by NASA goes in to detail about how this is a mission on a scale which has never been attempted before, the statement for the mission reads:

“This investigation represents a significant advancement in our understanding of the history and evolution of organic compounds in the solar system and hence a critical step along the path to understanding the evolution of life here on Earth and potential life elsewhere in the galaxy.”

The project is ambitious and huge risk, but even though it will require the upmost major planning, NASA have confirmed that they wish to get the mission started within the next 20 years, they will need to calculate how to get the sub to Titan which is an astonishing 1.4 billion km away, which to put it on context is 3,500 times as long as the journey to the moon, 300,000 trips from LA t0 New York.