2020 Keynote on the Future of the Military in Space · Space Mastery · Portugal
2020 To the Stars and Beyond: Deep Tech & AI · San Francisco
2020 International Astronautical Congress, 71st IAF · ESA
2020 SpaceCom 2020, Enabling Commercial Space · Colorado Springs
2019 Quantum Information Processing with Superconducting Circuits
2019 Materials Frontiers to Empower Quantum Computing
2018 FutureHack · Tokyo
2018 American School of Japan · Tokyo
2018 International School of Science · Tokyo
2018 Future of the Global Energy System, Institute for the Future · San Francisco
2016 Keizai · US-Japan Commercial Spaceflight · San Francisco
2016 Effective Altruism Summit · San Francisco
2016 Hive Global Leadership Forum · San Francisco
2016 RSA Information Security · San Francisco
2015 Hive Global Leadership Forum · San Francisco
2015 Further Future · TED Meets Burning Man · Las Vegas
2015 Hive Global Leadership Forum · San Francisco
2015 DefCon Information Security · Las Vegas
2015 Black Hat Information Security · Las Vegas
2014 The Future of Commercial Spaceflight · Silicon Valley Space Center
2014 Yuri’s Night: The First Manned Orbital Spaceflight · Los Angeles
2014 IEEE Quantum Photonics: The Next Frontier of Quantum Communications
2014 Yuri’s Night: The First Manned Orbital Spaceflight · Hawaiʻi
2012 NASA ESA JAXA Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems
2012 NASA CSF Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference · Palo Alto
2012 Quantum Information and Nanoscale Optoelectronics · Berkeley
2012 Yuri’s Night: The First Manned Orbital Spaceflight · Los Angeles
2012 Inaugural Quantum Future Technologies Conference · NASA Ames
2011 Quantum Coherence in Excitation Energy Transfer · Berkeley
2011 The Future of Spaceflight · Mobile Monday, Invited Keynote · Amsterdam
2011 Delft-Leiden Biannual Casimir Symposium · Leiden
2011 Alain Aspect: The Second Quantum Revolution · Leiden
2011 ESA-TNO Space Pier Day · The Hague
2010 Kavli-Delft Center for Bionanoscience, Founding Conference · Delft
2010 Quantum Mechanics in Higher-Dimensional Hilbert Spaces · Austria
2010 What is Real in the Quantum World? Int’l Akademie Traunkirchen · Austria
2010 NASA ESA JAXA Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems
2009 NASA ESA JAXA Japan-US Science, Technology and Space Applications Program
2009 From Foundations of Quantum Mechanics to Quantum Information · Delft
2009 DEISA Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications
2009 Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) · Amsterdam
2008 Quantum Decoherence and Quantum Information Science · Lorentz Center
2008 Triennial Conference on Low-Temperature Condensed Matter Physics XXV
2008 International Conference on Quantum Structures · Brussels
2007 Workshop on Time Symmetry in Quantum Mechanics · Brussels
2007 Optical Fabrication Technologies, Coherence and Metrology · Switzerland
2006 The Best of Nanoscience: International Symposium for Hans Mooij · Delft
2006 SPIE Defense and Security Applications of Quantum Information Science
2005 New Computational Paradigms: Neural Nets, Quantum, Biocomputing
2005 UNESCO Physics for Tomorrow, UNESCO Headquarters · Paris
2004 RSA Information Security · Barcelona
2004 SPIE Defense and Security Applications of Quantum Information Science
2004 Gordon Research Conference on Quantum Information
2003 Quantum Information Technology IX · Tokyo
2003 International Conference on Quantum Information · Tokyo
2002 NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Quantum Chaos · Lake Como
2002 National Science Foundation Coding Theory and Quantum Computing · Vienna
2002 United Nations International Student Conference · Amsterdam
2002 International Conference on High-Energy Physics XXXI · Amsterdam
2001 World Technology Summit · London
2001 French Senate Hearing on the Future of Artificial Intelligence · Paris
2001 US Government Conference on High Performance Computing · Salishan
2001 National Security Agency · Fort Meade
Black belt, First Class, shōdan.
Certificate of recognition as the first foreigner to qualify in eight years.
認許する, Japanese traditional archery,
Kyūdō, “standing Zen,” 弓道初,
formally recognized by the
Japanese National Kyūdō Federation (全日本弓道連盟)
while on a
Japanese National Fulbright Award
with the Association of International Education, Japan.
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.”
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.
“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.
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 two-story, three-bedroom apartment with cathedral ceilings and 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 soaring 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.
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
07 August 2022
International School of Science, Tokyo
05 August 2022
STEAM Summer School 2022
Mission: Mars
Tokyo, Japan
August 2022
29 May 2022
Highlights from the joint NASA working group
May 29, 2022
— Kevin Knuth and Christopher Altman featured in a forward-looking article on NASA's plans to work with a Congressionally-mandated interagency UAP Task Force on the investigation of UAP. Kevin H. Knuth, Associate Professor of Physics, University at Albany (SUNY), and former NASA research scientist stated:
“It's about time that scientists start taking this subject seriously, especially since there is a potential for paradigm-shifting implications. I would be very interested in knowing whether NASA astronauts have had any encounters with UAPs like US Navy pilots.”
Starlab veteran Christopher Altman, a NASA-trained Commercial Astronaut and Research Affiliate at the Harvard University Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, commented on the NASA working group, stating:
“The development signals a refreshing sea change, a quantum leap forward—completely unprecedented in NASA's 65-year history addressing the phenomenon. We're entering into a new era of openness, transparency, and accountability that holds the potential to shed light on one of mankind's greatest enduring mysteries.”
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