EUROPEAN UNION・ANNO DOMINI 2001.
Starlab was borne as an incubator for long-term and basic research in the spirit of Bell Labs, MIT Media Lab, Xerox PARC, and Interval Research. Its research mantras were “Deep Future” and “A place where one hundred years means nothing.” Approximately 130 scientists from thirty-seven different nationalities — each established leaders in their respective research fields — lived and worked at the lab.
A second base of operations, Starlab DF-II (Deep Future II) was established in the Royal Observatory in Spain on a mountaintop perch overlooking the city of Barcelona. With a more tightly-focused mission scope of space-borne and neuroscience research, DF-II continues to innovate and grow to present day.
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| Discovery Channel Special |
When the laboratory came up short on research grants in June, I personally went to the President himself when fate brought us together at the same time and place on his first trip overseas after election. The Commander in Chief, who had just arrived in Brussels for a meeting with NATO, impressed us with both his immediate familiarity with our work and and his enthusiasm in response to my earnest request for $1M in budget that had been allocated for national security priority scientific research topics through a grant newly created by Clinton with his last act in office, the 2001 National Nanotechnology Initiative.
Following three days of enraptured debate with senior politicians, senators and international diplomats at the French Sénat hearing on artificial intelligence in Paris, the world's first senate hearing on the topic, Starlab's principal investigator and AI program lead, Hugo de Garis, predicted I could one day even be elected President myself. Far sooner than that, however, he drew my attention to the threat of assassination from technology Luddites who stand in opposition to the rapid pace of progress in technology and artificial intelligence.
Our living arrangements at the lab consisted of an expansive three-bedroom master suite with fully-stocked library, typically reserved for visiting prime ministers, senators, and senior diplomats. My quarters were shared with none other than the project's principal scientific investigator, Hugo de Garis. One midsummer's afternoon as the two of us strolled on a random walk through the sprawling estate and lush wooded grounds surrounding the manor, immersed in a passionate debate on the long-term promise and perils of superintelligence, the ever-eccentric
de Garis came up with the radical idea to obtain a life-size replica of Fat Man — the solid plutonium core, 21 kiloton, 10,300-pound nuclear bomb detonated over Nagasaki in World War II — and to mount it precariously to the vaulted ceilings of my apartment, with the bomb hanging directly over my bed. 
The Volkswagen beetle-sized replica of the bomb was constructed for the Discovery Channel documentary de Garis had just finished filming on the future of artificial intelligence, which featured a potential global war between humanity and artificial intelligence. He'd purchased it outright from the director, making arrangements for expedited shipping and delivery direct to Starlab's headquarters in Brussels. The sheer audacity of the proposal was outrageous. He intended the bomb to serve as a dramatic and powerful reminder of “the weight of my responsibility to the future of humanity.” He certainly knew how to drive home a point..jpg)
A recent Financial Times (FT) spinoff magazine article in Sifted highlights our research going back to Starlab, AI and time travel research projects, and my subsequent travels across East Asia to create national quantum roadmaps for US national research funding and IC agency directors. In years that followed, I continued on through research fellowships in nanoscience and the foundations of quantum mechanics with Nobel physics laureate Anton Zeilinger’s research group in Austria and across Europe, then was recruited to lead a futures initiative at NASA in collaboration with Ray Kurzweil and Google, together with leading companies, luminary scientists, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and around the world.
From manned spaceflight training at NASA on to the summit of a volcano where the Apollo 11 astronauts trained before the first landing to put a man on the Moon, to field expeditions employing state-of-the-art sensors in rough desert terrain, from collaborations leading diplomats to advise the United Nations on critical security issues of the future to multidisciplinary teams of scientists, researchers, special forces domain experts and engineers field testing next-generation technologies in austere environments — each of these initiatives was undertaken with the singular aim to make a profound and positive impact on the future of humanity, for our children, our children’s children, and the generations yet to come.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light — not our darkness — that most frightens us. We oft ask ourselves: ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are we not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small here doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that lies within us. It’s not just in some of us. It’s in everyone—and as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. ”
— Marianne Williamson
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