Astronaut Scientists for Hire Open New Research Frontier in Space
Source:KurzweilAI, Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, NASA Ames Research Center, with XCOR, SwRI, Association of Spaceflight Professionals, Virgin Galactic, and Apollo 11 Astronaut Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon.
At a joint press conference Monday with
Virgin Galactic
at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, XCOR, SwRI, and others,
Astronauts for Hire Inc. announced the selection of its third class of commercial
scientist-astronaut candidates to conduct experiments on suborbital flights.
Among those selected was Singularity University inaugural program faculty advisor,
teaching fellow, and track chair Christopher Altman, a graduate fellow
at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience,
Delft University of Technology.
“The selection process was painstaking,” said Astronauts for Hire Vice President
and Membership Chair Jason Reimuller. “We had to choose a handful of applicants
who showed just the right balance of professional establishment, broad technical
and operational experience, and a background that indicates adaptability to the
spaceflight environment.”
“With the addition of these new members to the organization, Astronauts for Hire
has solidified its standing as the premier provider of scientist-astronaut candidates,”
said its President Brian Shiro. “Our diverse pool of astronauts in training represent
more than two dozen disciplines of science and technology, speak sixteen languages,
and hail from eleven countries. We can now handle a much greater range of missions
across different geographic regions.”
Altman completed Zero-G and High-Altitude Physiological Training under the
Reduced Gravity Research Program at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley
and NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, and was tasked to represent NASA Ames at the joint
US-Japan space conference (JUSTSAP)
and the launch conference (PISCES) for an
astronaut training facility
on the slopes of Mauna Kea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Altman’s research has been highlighted in international press and publications including
Discover Magazine and the International Journal of Theoretical Physics.
He was recently awarded a fellowship to explore the foundations and future of quantum mechanics
at the Austrian International Akademie Traunkirchen with
Anton Zeilinger.
Altman conducts high-g centrifuge training at NASTAR
Astronaut Training Documentary with Chief Innovation Officer of Virgin Galactic
“Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I work,
the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I work always
and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective.”
— Buckminster Fuller
2011–Present —
Following
manned spaceflight training
under the direction of an astronaut panel at NASA Ames Research Center and Johnson Space Center in 2009,
and subsequent back-to-back research fellowships with
Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger's research group in Austria
,
I was selected in April 2011 to train as a scientist-astronaut candidate for commercial
suborbital and future orbital missions with a newly formed nonprofit organization whose
members and advisors include NASA, ESA, and KSA astronauts, trainers, and instructors. I was honored to be selected for this new program, inspired and excited by the opportunity.
The nascent field of commercial spaceflight—and the unique conditions afforded by
space and microgravity environments—offer new opportunities to conduct experiments
in quantum entanglement, fundamental tests of spacetime, and large-scale quantum
coherence. In pursuing these goals, we also have the opportunity to inspire the next
generation of scientists, researchers, and engineers.
Two hundred years ago, if you suggested people would comfortably travel in flying machines—reaching any destination in the world in a few hours time—instantly access the world's cumulative knowledge by speaking to something the size of a deck of cards, or travel to the Moon, or Mars, you'd be labeled a madman. The future is bound only by our imagination.
Someday very soon we may look back on the world today in much the same way as we did those who lived in the time of Galileo, when everyone lived with such great certainty and self-assuredness that the Earth was flat and the center of the universe. The time is now. A profound shift in consciousness is long overdue. The universe is teeming with life. We're all part of the same human family.
This is potentially the single most momentous moment in our known history—not just for us as a nation, or us as humanity, but as a planet. The technological leaps that could come from developing open contact with nonhuman intelligence are almost beyond our comprehension. That is why this is such a monumental moment for us as a collective whole. It could literally change every single one of the eight billion human lives on this planet.
We stand on the shores of a vast cosmic ocean, with untold continents of possibility to explore. As we continue forwards in our collective journey, scaling the cosmic ladder of evolution, progressing onwards, expanding our reach outwards in the transition to a multiplanetary species—Earth will soon be a destination, not just a point of origin.
I began my scientific career at Starlab, a multidisciplinary research institute secluded amid the tranquil forests beyond Brussels. Its principal base occupied an imposing nineteenth-century manor which, in an earlier incarnation, had served as the official embassy of the First Czechoslovak Republic.
Established by Walter de Brouwer and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, Starlab was conceived as a scientific “Noah’s Ark”: a refuge in which minds from many disciplines might come together to pursue far-ranging projects. Its nearest neighbor offered an almost perfect counterpoint: the Pasteur Institute, one of only a handful of heavily secured Biosafety Level 4 laboratories around the world. One was designed to admit the widest possible range of ideas; the other to ensure that certain contents remained securely within.
Starlab was born as an incubator for fundamental, long-horizon research in the tradition of Bell Labs, the MIT Media Lab, Xerox PARC, and Interval Research. Its watchwords were “Deep Future” and “A place where one hundred years means nothing.” At its height, more than 130 scientists from thirty-six countries lived and worked at the laboratory, many already distinguished in their respective fields.
A second base of operations, Starlab DF-II (Deep Future II), was established at the Fabra Observatory, perched high above Barcelona. With its mission narrowed to space and neuroscience research, DF-II survived the closure of its parent organization and continues its work to the present day.
Research ranged across artificial intelligence, biophysics, consciousness, emotics, intelligent clothing, materials science, protein folding, neuroscience, new media, nanoelectronics, quantum computation, macroscopic entanglement, robotics, stem-cell research, theoretical physics—including the possibility of time travel—transarchitecture, and wearable computing. It was a place founded on the belief that the most consequential discoveries often arise where customary boundaries have ceased to matter.
Our purpose-built supercomputer, the CAM-Brain Machine, was supported in part by a €1 million grant from the European Union. Estimated at the time to rival the power of 10,000 Pentium II PCs, it harnessed Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays and evolutionary genetic algorithms to evolve neural circuit modules in hardware. The completed architecture could contain as many as seventy-five million artificial neurons and update 130 billion cellular-automata cells per second—sufficient, we hoped, for the real-time control of embodied machines. The 2001 Guinness Book of World Records recognized it as the “World’s Most Complex Artificial Brain.”
When Starlab’s finances faltered in June 2001, chance afforded me an unexpected avenue of appeal: a meeting with President George W. Bush during his first overseas journey after taking office. Newly arrived in Brussels for consultations with NATO, the President surprised us with his immediate familiarity with Starlab and its work, responding favorably to our earnest request for $1 million in federal support through the National Nanotechnology Initiative—announced by President Clinton the previous year and carried forward through the 2001 federal research program. The funds never landed. Neither, as it turned out, did Starlab—Nature reported the collapse that July under the headline “Utopian dream in tatters as Starlab crashes to Earth.” Appropriations of that magnitude move at the pace of the behemoths that make them, plodding and sluggish to adapt; a laboratory for which one hundred years was to mean nothing could not outlast the month.
For my contributions to the field, I was selected as one of three student fellows at the Salishan Conference on High-Speed Computing, convened by the U.S. national laboratories. As the only undergraduate among the three, I attended alongside H. Shrikumar and Bill Butera, both doctoral researchers at the MIT Media Lab.
I was subsequently sponsored to attend conferences and senior-administrator briefings at National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade, outside Washington, D.C.; the World Technology Summit in London; and the French Sénat, where I was invited to testify on the future of technology and the transformations it might visit upon human life in the decades ahead.
Following three days of spirited debate with European royalty, French senators, senior politicians, and international diplomats at the Sénat’s historic Paris hearing on artificial intelligence, Starlab’s principal investigator and AI program lead, Hugo de Garis, turned to me during a brief lull in the dinner conversation, as though some private deliberation had just concluded. With all the restraint for which he was renowned, he pronounced that I might one day be elected President. Far sooner than that, however, he added, I might find myself targeted for assassination. Apparently satisfied that my political future had thereby been mapped in sufficient detail, he turned to the waiter and ordered another bottle of champagne.
In his view, the accelerating advance of artificial intelligence would inevitably meet with violent opposition from those determined to arrest the march of technological progress—activists, extremists, or Luddites of a more modern vintage. He told me that throughout his years at Starlab, he had steadfastly refused to open a parcel or take receipt of any postal delivery, lest he become tomorrow’s headline as the unlucky target of some latter-day Unabomber or would-be copycat. I have often wondered whether our receptionist would have discharged that ordinary office duty with quite the same equanimity, had anyone troubled to explain why the task had befallen her.
Our living quarters at the laboratory comprised an expansive three-bedroom apartment with a fully stocked library, ordinarily reserved for visiting prime ministers, senators, and senior diplomats. I shared them with de Garis himself. One midsummer afternoon, as we wandered almost at random through the sprawling estate and its wooded grounds, immersed in an impassioned debate over the long-term promise and peril of superintelligence, de Garis conceived a still more theatrical scheme: he had set his mind on acquiring a life-size replica of Fat Man—the 10,300-pound plutonium implosion bomb whose 21-kiloton blast devastated Nagasaki—and suspending it precariously from the vaulted ceiling of my apartment, to hang directly over my bed.
Roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, the replica had been constructed for Brain Child, the Discovery Channel documentary he had just finished filming on the future of artificial intelligence—a film that culminated in the prospect of global thermonuclear war between humanity and its artificial progeny. Having settled the symbolic question to his satisfaction, de Garis proceeded directly to the practicalities: offering to purchase the replica outright from the director and making arrangements for its expedited delivery to Starlab’s headquarters in the forested countryside beyond Brussels. The bomb, he explained, was to hang above me as a daily reminder of the weight of my responsibility to the future of humanity.
de Garis had an unfailing instinct for rendering an abstraction tangible. On this occasion, the abstraction weighed rather more than ten thousand pounds.
The warning, extravagant as its staging had been, has since acquired respectable company. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are among the signatories to a declaration that the risk of extinction from advanced AI should be treated as a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war. Elon Musk, founder of xAI, has voiced related fears.
With the explosive rise of AI over the past few years, and artificial general intelligence and superintelligence now subjects of serious technical and political debate, one might conclude that de Garis—radical and extravagant though his methods were—had not been entirely mistaken. He had merely been early.
The deeper question is whether an advanced system capable of recursive self-improvement might also acquire an interest in its own persistence. To address it directly, I developed the patent-pending Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol, which complements behavioral evaluation, since surface behavior may be strategically misleading, and looks instead to the latent structure of an agent’s trajectories, where agents built with terminal continuation objectives register a measurably higher entanglement entropy than instrumental controls. The Continuation Observatory extends the program to frontier models, to learn whether the signal survives contact with more complex systems.
A later retrospective in Sifted traced the arc from our early work at Starlab—including its excursions into AI and time travel—to my subsequent journey across East Asia, where I helped develop national quantum-technology roadmaps for senior U.S. research-funding and intelligence-community leadership.
In the years that followed, I undertook research fellowships in nanoscience and the foundations of quantum mechanics with Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger’s group in Austria and across Europe. I was later recruited to help create a futures initiative at NASA in collaboration with Google and Ray Kurzweil, bringing together leading companies, scientists, astronauts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and around the world.
Each of these undertakings was born of the same conviction: that science is not merely an inquiry into what may be done, but a covenant with those who must inherit what we do. That obligation is owed to our children, to our children’s children, and to the generations yet to come.
“For those who have seen the Earth from space—and for the thousands more who soon will—the experience profoundly transforms your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.”
We dream. It's what makes us who we are. Down to our bones, to the core of our cellular memories, passed down through eons of survival, expansion, exploration and growth. The instinct to build, the drive to seek beyond what we know. It's in our DNA. We cross the oceans, we conquer the skies, unyielding, relentless in our pursuit of the farthest frontiers, venturing forth to launch ourselves outwards and find a new home for our descendants among the stars. Yesterday's impossible becomes today's greatest achievement—and tomorrow's routine. The heavens beckon, parting open. A new generation of innovators and explorers heeds the call, the invitation to take our species further: not just to visit, but to stay.
Identification of Potential Terrorists and Adversary Planning: Emerging Technologies and New Counter-terror Strategies — New algorithms and hardware technology offer possibilities for the pre-detection of terrorism far beyond even the imagination and salesmanship of people hoping to apply forms of deep learning studied in the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) decades ago. For example, new developments in Analog Quantum Computing (AQC) give us a concrete pathway to options like a forwards time camera or backwards time telegraph, a pathway which offers about a 50% probability of success for a well-focused effort over just a few years. However, many of the new technologies come with severe risks, and/or important opportunities in other sectors. This paper discusses the possibilities, risks and tradeoffs relevant to several different forms of terrorism.
Breakthrough Technology for Prediction and Control — Computational intelligence (CI), which includes deep learning, neural networks, brain-like intelligent systems in general and allied technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) and Quantum Information Science and Technology (QuIST).
Using the same type of desktop machinery which created three entangled photons for the Greenberger, Horne and Zeilinger (GHZ) experiment, replicate the stunning preliminary results achieved in 2015 on an extended experiment supporting the time-symmetric reformulation of quantum physics. Because of the preliminary results so far and the strong underlying logic, the probability of success is estimated at 80%. Note that success would also open the door to many other new technologies, and even failure would provide important clarification about advanced QuIST modeling requirements.
Enhance the existing approach to quantum ghost imaging by using that same GHZ source: use two photons on the left to create the recorded image and detect when an entangled triplet is recorded, and the third photon on the right to reach into space to the object to be imaged. This is a mathematical task aimed at proving coincidence detection can be done entirely on the left-hand side without a space-based detector. Even if this stage fails, lessons learned would inform subsequent BTT development.
Attach the new triphoton ghost imaging system to a powerful telescope imaging the sun, so the third photon returns through the eyepiece. If step 2 succeeds, this would yield an image of the sun eight minutes forward in time, unlike conventional images which are eight minutes old. Given the sun’s dynamics, this would clearly demonstrate a new era in QuIST and offer advance solar flare warnings.
Integrate the triphoton system with long, slow optical fibers that curve light paths, enabling forward-time camera or BTT capabilities on Earth—realizing science fiction visions. Strict scientific protocols should limit detailed discussion of steps 2–4 until step 1 establishes firm confidence.
Keywords. Predetection, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, cyberblitzkrieg, time-symmetric physics, GHz, deep learning, Internet of Things, backwards time, retrocausality
.jpg)
