Research Lab | Christopher Altman

12 May 2024

Starlab: Deep Future
The 'Noah’s Ark' of scientific research that launched 1,000 startup ideas

Lab-concocted vodka, time travel and epilepsy treatments:

Welcome to the Moonshot Factory

“ a place where 100 years means nothing … ”

Financial Times | Sifted | 08 08 2022 — What happens when you round up more than one hundred of some of the world's greatest scientists, maverick geniuses working on some of the world’s most groundbreaking ideas, put them together in a Belgian castle, and let their imaginations run wild?

Fire extinguisher duels, bootleg vodka made with lab-procured ethanol and worldbeating treatments for epilepsy are just some of what went down at Starlab : a one-of-a-kind experiment created to unite some of the world’s most daring technologists.

When it was founded in 1996, Starlab was compared to other top research institutes — like Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center — that successfully bridged the gap between idea and market. It was also a prototype for the ambitious organizations of today like Google’s “moonshot factory,” X , trying to bring entirely new ideas to the world.

But the centre’s idealism was to be its downfall; its pie-in-the-sky approach couldn’t pay the bills, and it went dramatically bankrupt during the dotcom crash. But what most people don’t know is that Starlab’s legacy lives on in the picturesque hills overlooking Barcelona and elsewhere.

Many European VCs and universities claim they’re backing innovations that will solve humanity’s problems, but huge successes have been elusive. One of the companies from Starlab’s second generation has found significant success, but the centre's tale forces anyone interested in innovation to ask themselves: how do we really bring the wildest ideas to life — and make them financially viable?

The Noah’s Ark of science

Christopher Altman

Starlab was established by serial entrepreneur Walter De Brouwer together with MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and European VC pioneer Johan Konings. The idea was to create a utopian “Noah’s Ark” of science, where the brightest minds from different fields would be brought together to work on “deep future” research.

“De Brouwer’s ambition was to bring the best scientists in the world together to ‘ think thoughts for the very first time. ’ It was very interdisciplinary — no walls, no boundaries, no borders …” says Christopher Altman — astronaut, quantum physicist and Starlab veteran.

In its heyday, Starlab was home to more than 130 scientists from 36 countries, who worked on ideas ranging from time travel and consciousness to new media and “intelligent” clothing. The majority lived on site: a neoclassical castle designed in the late 1800s on the outskirts of Brussels.

Starlab “Time Travel Party,” May 2001. ( L to R ): Hugo de Garis,
Serguei Krasnikov, Roman Zapatrin, Christopher Altman

“It was like a pirate ship in a way, which is what I think I fell in love with. Or you could call it a kind of sect,” laughs Giulio Rufini, neuroscientist and current CEO at Starlab . “We’d stay up all night talking in-depth theoretical implications of closed timelike curves ( time travel ). Roman had a centuries-old recipe for homemade vodka and put to use some surplus ethanol he reappropriated from the biophysics lab down in the basement,” says Altman, referring to one of his colleagues, a quantum topologist and mathematician. “One time a few of the researchers covered themselves in yards of aluminium foil as “ armor” and started a duel, complete with fire extinguishers as weapons, in the courtyard.”

22 August 2023

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.

“The nascent field of commercial spaceflight and the unique conditions afforded by space and microgravity environments offer exciting new opportunities to conduct novel experiments in quantum entanglement, fundamental tests of spacetime, and large-scale quantum coherence,” said Altman.

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.

11 August 2023

How to build a ship for interstellar travel

10 July 2023

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.

09 July 2023

Starlab, Singularity, and Nuclear Armageddon

EUROPEAN UNION・ANNO DOMINI 2001.

I began my scientific career at a multidisciplinary research institute, Starlab, located deep in the serene and secluded forests outside Brussels, Belgium. The lab’s principal base of operations was housed in a historic landmark — an imposing 19^th century manor, remarkable both in scale and magnificence. In a previous incarnation, the palatial grounds served as official embassy for the First Republic of Czechoslovakia. Its nearest neighbor, the world renowned Pastéur Institute, was one of but a handful of highly-secured Biosafety Level 4 labs in the world.

Cofounded by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and serial entrepreneur Walter de Brouwer and established in partnership with MIT, Oxford and Ghent University, Starlab was created as a “Noah's Ark” to bring together the world's most brilliant and creative scientists to work on far-ranging multidisciplinary projects that hold the potential to convey a profound and positive impact on future generations.

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.

Discovery Channel Special

Onsite research ranged from 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 — e.g., the possibility of time travel — transarchitecture, and wearable computing.

Our custom-built supercomputer, the CAM-Brain Machine, was supported in part by a 1 Million Euro grant from the European Union. The custom-designed and created supercomputer — as powerful as 10,000 Pentium II PCs — harnessed the power of Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA) evolutionary hardware to evolve seventy-five million neurons in a massively-parallel artificial neural network instantiated directly in silico using evolutionary genetic algorithms. With each clock tick, the supercomputer simultaneously updates hundreds of millions of cellular automata billions of times per second. The one-of-a-kind machine was recognized by the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records as the “World’s Most Complex Artificial Brain.” In testimony before the French Sénat and a later advisory report as Chair of the First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, I argued: “Future networks will not be built. They will be grown.”

When the laboratory came up short on research grants in June, I personally went to the President himself when serendipity 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 upon us both his immediate familiarity with the lab and its work, and his approval in response to our earnest request for $1M in budget — funds 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.

For my contributions to the field, I was honored to be selected as one of three student fellows selected for promise and potential to impact the future of the field at the U.S. national laboratories’ Salishan Conference on High-Speed Computing. As the only undergraduate among the three, I shared attendance with 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 Fort Meade, National Security Agency headquarters outside Washington, DC, attended the World Technology Summit in London, was an invited delegate to the French Sénat to provide testimony on the future of technology and how it will transform our lives over coming decades, and more.

Following three days of enraptured debate with senators, senior politicians, and international diplomats at the French Sénat for its historic hearing on artificial intelligence in Paris — the world's first senate hearing on the subject — Starlab's principal investigator and AI program lead, Hugo de Garis, suggested that I might one day even be elected President myself. Far sooner than that, however, he drew our attention to the possibility of violent threats from activists, extremists, or technology Luddites who might rise in opposition to the rapid pace of progress in science and artificial intelligence. In our time working together at the lab, de Garis often refused to open packages or accept postal deliveries, fearing he may be targeted by the likes of the Unabomber or a would-be copycat.

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 himself. 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 a 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 a 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.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI founder Elon Musk, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have each warned that advanced AI could pose an extinction-level risk comparable to nuclear war.

That question has shaped my work for decades. To address the risk directly, I developed and patented a framework — the Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol — that detects whether an AI system treats self-continuation as a terminal goal rather than an instrumental one. The method doesn't rely on behavioral observation, which can be gamed. It operates on latent structure: agents with terminal continuation objectives produce measurably higher von Neumann entanglement entropy in their trajectory geometry than agents that treat continuation as a means to other ends. That entropy differential is the signal. The Continuation Observatory runs this measurement against frontier models globally, detecting emergent continuation signatures in real time.

With the explosive rise of AI we've seen over the last twenty-four months alone, with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) seemingly just around the corner, one could say that de Garis — though radical and exceedingly unconventional in his unprecedented approach — was just a few years ahead of his time.

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 help create a futures initiative at NASA in collaboration with Google and Ray Kurzweil, together with leading companies, luminary scientists, astronauts, 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 their first landing to put a man on the Moon, to the development and deployment of a fundamentally new quantum communication system based on continuous-variable quantum teleportation to provide space-based NASA assets with unconditional information security — from collaborations leading diplomats to advise the United Nations on critical security issues of the future — to field expeditions employing state-of-the-art sensors in rough desert terrain with a multidisciplinary team of scientists, special forces operators, and agency directors beta-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.

08 July 2023

Overview

“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.”

— Don Williams

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.