Last year, a company named Nectome, "advetised" a service for backing up & (eventually) digitizing people's brains which was going to be 100%-fatal. They retracted saying it wasn't correct they expected to revive a whole consciousness from the connectome buff.ly/2YT1Eaq
The actual computational requirements for running an uploaded human mind are very difficult to quantify & strongly depend on the chosen level of simulation model scale. In other words, if you want a very precise copy, you need a ginormous processing power buff.ly/2G0UCYG
There is, however, a different approach to mind uploading that uses a completely different set of technologies: mind virtualisation, i.e. extracting a number of characteristics from a mind to develop a model that can be used to simulate future behaviour buff.ly/2KdpXg4
In 2015, a digital imitation of circuitry in a sandgrain-sized chunk of rat brain was realized. The work modeled some 31,000 virtual brain cells connected by roughly 37 million synapses ow.ly/Hmy230olJlN
In 2013, the European Union funded the Human Brain Project, led by Henry Markram, to the tune of $1.3 billion. Markram claimed that the project would create a simulation of the entire human brain on a supercomputer within a decade buff.ly/2uP5e7s
You can find an interesting collection of articles looking at both technology aspects and to social ethical questions of mind uploading and mind virualization at minduploading.org
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Born 400 years ago #Today, Blaise Pascal was child prodigy, mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian. He was pioneer in the natural and applied sciences and invented one of the first mechanical calculators
Pascal designed and built one of the earliest mechanical calculators, known as Pascal's Calculator or Pascaline. It was a pioneering device that used gears and wheels to perform addition and subtraction. It laid the foundation for mechanical computation
He introduced the namesake Triangle, a triangular arrangement of numbers with various mathematical properties. Each number in the triangle is the sum of the two numbers directly above it.
54 years ago #Today, one of the most famous images ever taken was snapped from the orbit of the Moon. Now known as "Earthrise", with modern digital technology, the iconic image -- originally in black and white -- has been remastered ow.ly/Hir130n5JpX
“The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis to the big vastness of space.” — Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell buff.ly/2EMnMMG#Apollo8#54YearsAgoToday
54 years ago #Today, Apollo 8 entered the lunar orbit. Humans are in orbit around another world for the first time. This is the third TV live broadcast. A #Christmas gift: human eyes see the Moon up close bit.ly/2ionb8I
The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest, most powerful particle accelerator: in a way it's the world's largest single machine. It consists of a 27-km ring excavated between the lake of Geneva and the Jura mountain range at an average depth of 100 m. Let's see some facts
Each of the 6000-9000 superconducting filaments of niobium-titanium coiled between them to make up the LHC cables is 0.007 mm thick, about 10 times thinner than a normal human hair. If put one after another they would stretch from the Earth to the Sun and back six times
The protons accelerated are obtained from standard hydrogen. Although proton beams are very intense (1.15x10¹¹ protons in a beam size of 3.5 micrometres), only 2 nanograms of hydrogen are accelerated each day. It would take about 1 million years to accelerate 1 gram of hydrogen.