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“Pantheon” creator Craig Silverstein on uploading our brains to the internet

“The meaningful difference,” argues Silverstein, “comes down to our lifespan. For humans, our mortality defines so much of our experience. If a human commits murder and receives a life sentence, we understand what that means: a finite number of years. But if a UI with an indefinite lifespan commits murder, what do life sentences mean? Are we talking about a regular human lifespan? 300 years? A thousand? Then there’s love and relationships. Let’s say you find your soulmate and spend a thousand years together. At some point, you may decide you had a good run and move on with someone else. The idea of not growing old with someone feels alien and upsetting. But if we were to live hundreds or thousands of years, our perceptions of relationships and identity may change fundamentally.”


“One of the best” because — in addition to having a well-crafted, suspenseful, and heartfelt narrative about love and loss — thoughtfully engages with both the technical and philosophical questions raised by its cerebral premise: Is a perfect digital copy of a person’s mind still meaningfully human? Does uploaded intelligence, which combines the processing power of a supercomputer with the emotional intelligence of a sentient being, have a competitive edge over cold, unfeeling artificial intelligence? How would uploaded intelligence compromise ethics or geopolitical strategy?

“Underrated” because was produced by — and first aired on — AMC+, a streaming service that, owing to the dominance of Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, and Amazon Prime, has but a fraction of its competitors’ subscribers and which, motivated by losses in ad revenue, ended up canceling the show’s highly anticipated (and fully completed) second season in exchange for tax write-offs. Although has since been salvaged by Netflix, […] its troubled distribution history resulted in the show becoming a bit of a hidden gem, rather than the global hit it could have been, had it premiered on a platform with more eyeballs.

Still, the fact that managed to endure and build a steadily growing cult following is a testament to the show’s quality and cultural relevance. Although the concept of uploaded intelligence is nothing new, and has been tackled by other prominent sci-fi properties like Black Mirror and Altered Carbon, is unique in that it not only explores how this hypothetical technology would affect us on a personal level, but also explores how it might play out on a societal level. Furthermore, take is a nuanced one, rejecting both techno-pessimism and techno-optimism in favor of what series creator Craig Silverstein calls “techno-realism.”

Physicist revisits the computational limits of life and Schrödinger’s essential question in the era of quantum computing

More than 80 years ago, Erwin Schrödinger, a theoretical physicist steeped in the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the Upanishads, delivered a series of public lectures at Trinity College, Dublin, which eventually came to be published in 1944 under the title “What is Life?”

Now, in the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, Philip Kurian, a and founding director of the Quantum Biology Laboratory (QBL) at Howard University in Washington, D.C., has used the laws of quantum mechanics, which Schrödinger postulated, and the QBL’s discovery of cytoskeletal filaments exhibiting quantum optical features, to set a drastically revised upper bound on the computational capacity of carbon-based life in the entire history of Earth.

Published in Science Advances, Kurian’s latest work conjectures a relationship between this information-processing limit and that of all matter in the observable universe.

AI Is Actually a Form of ‘Alien Intelligence,’ Harvard Professor Claims—And It Will Surpass Humans

This phenomenon did not surprise Harvard University professor and virtuoso theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, Ph.D., who is convinced AI will soon surpass anything the human brain’s flesh-and-blood machinery is capable of.

“We’re just in the infancy of this era,” Loeb says. “It will be essential for us as a species to maintain superiority, but it will illustrate to us that we are not the pinnacle of creation.”

In a blog post, Loeb ponders how advanced the artificial intelligence of hypothetical alien civilizations could have possibly grown—especially civilizations that might have already been around for billions of years before anything vaguely humanoid appeared in the cosmos. What would the AI’s capabilities look like? What would be its limits? Are there even any limits left?

Futuristic Earth Infected: Alien Fungal Takeover 🌿👽 (AI Generated Sci-Fi Video)

🌍 What if Earth was no longer ours? Imagine a reality where alien fungal lifeforms took over the planet, reshaping cities, nature, and even human civilization itself.

👁️ This AI-generated Sci-Fi short film is a mind-bending journey into an alternate Earth—a world overtaken by bioluminescent alien fungi, spore-based civilizations, and an eerie, surreal atmosphere.

🔬 Inspired by nature’s most resilient organisms, this vision of the future combines biology, science fiction, and cosmic horror into one epic cinematic experience!

🎧 Best experienced with headphones!
🔔 SUBSCRIBE for more AI-Generated Sci-Fi content every day!
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💡 Created with:
🎨 MidJourney V6.1 (AI Art)
🎞 Hailuo AI (AI Animation)
🎶 Suno AI v4 (AI Music)

#alienworlds #mushroom #scifishortstory #aigenerated #futuristicworld #alienplanet #hailuoai #midjourneyart #scifishortfilm #aianimationvideo

Biggest Ringworlds in all of Science Fiction

Ringworlds are one of science fiction’s most imaginative megastructures, essentially it is a giant ring that serves as a biosphere for an entire civilization or ecosystem at the very least, with the inside surface serving as a habitable world. Or Imagine a ring so enormous that its inner surface area could be equal to literally millions of Earths! The surface is designed to mimic a planetary environment, complete with cities, forests, and oceans. The structure would either orbit around a star or if it is big enough it would encircle the star.
Using centrifugal force, its rotation is thus used to generate artificial gravity, while massive panels or “shadow squares” can be used to regulate light to create a day-night cycles. Obviously, contructing such a megastructure would require materials of super strength, far beyond anything currently known to exist and gathering resources for its construction could involve dismantling entire planets or asteroid belts. Can such things exist in reality? Maybe a higher tier alien civilization could make these, I don’t know, but in science fiction, there are quite a few of them out here & so lets take a look at the Biggest 10 of these ringworlds.

Credits:
https://www.warhammer-community.com/
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/
https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/

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Have We Found an Alien Stellar Engine? | Clément Vidal

Download Star Trek Fleet Command for FREE now here: https://bit.ly/3XYvSJ2 to support my channel, and enter the promo code VOYAGER30 to unlock Neelix, the morale officer from Voyager FREE.

Dr. Clément Vidal joins John Michael Godier to discuss his new paper on the Spider Stellar Engine, a hypothetical form of stellar propulsion using binary pulsar systems. The conversation explores how such systems could serve as **technosignatures**, the philosophy of post-biological civilizations, and the potential for advanced beings to manipulate entire stars or even create new universes.

Vidal, C. 2024. “The Spider Stellar Engine: A Fully Steerable Extraterrestrial Design?” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 77 : 156–66. doi:10.59332/jbis-077–05-0156. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05038.

Vidal, C. 2019. “Pulsar Positioning System: A Quest for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Engineering.” International Journal of Astrobiology 18 : 213–34. doi:10.1017/S147355041700043X. https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03316.

Delahaye, J. P., and C. Vidal. 2018. “Organized Complexity: Is Big History a Big Computation?” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 17 : 49–54. http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.07111.

#EventHorizon #SETI #Technosignatures #Astrophysics #StellarEngines #FermiParadox #ExtraterrestrialLife #Pulsars #SpaceExploration #PhilosophyOfScience #cosmology.

How Future Technology Will Change the Fermi Paradox (Sci-Fi Documentary)

This video takes a look at how future technology could change the Fermi Paradox. Asking if humanity is looking for life in the Universe in the wrong ways, or are we looking for the wrong things. Like trying to find smoke signals, in the age of fiber optics.

While the Drake Equation estimates how many civilizations could exist in the Universe, but what is the likelihood that humanity is even capable of detecting them.

Does there need to be another calculation, say the Detection Probability Equation. Showing what’s the likelihood that humanity is able to detect alien life at a given time, and solving the Fermi Paradox.

And does this create a new paradox. Because if future technology advancements increase the number of possible cosmic civilizations, could it also decrease humanity’s ability in detecting them — leading to the detection paradox.

Other topics covered in this sci-fi documentary video include: space telescopes, dyson spheres, the movie Contact by Carl Sagan, Interstellar movie and the time dilation effects, the great silence, the great filter, and solutions and theories for the Fermi Paradox.

PATREON

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