An O'Neill cylinder would consist of two counter-rotating
cylinders. The cylinders would rotate in opposite directions in order to
cancel out any gyroscopic
effects that would otherwise make it difficult to keep them aimed
toward the Sun. Each would be 5 miles (8.0 km) in diameter and 20 miles
(32 km) long, connected at each end by a rod via a bearing system. Their rotation would provide artificial gravity.
Interior view, showing alternating land and window stripes
Background
Artist's impression of the interior of an O'Neill cylinder, showing the curvature of the inner surface
While teaching undergraduate physics at Princeton University, O'Neill set his students the task of designing large structures in outer space,
with the intent of showing that living in space could be desirable.
Several of the designs were able to provide volumes large enough to be
suitable for human habitation. This cooperative result inspired the idea
of the cylinder and was first published by O'Neill in a September 1974
article of Physics Today.
O'Neill's project was not the first example of this concept. In 1954, the German scientist Hermann Oberth described the use of gigantic habitable cylinders for space travel in his book Menschen im Weltraum—Neue Projekte für Raketen- und Raumfahrt (People in Space—New Projects for Rockets and Space Travel). In 1970, science-fiction author Larry Niven proposed a similar, but larger scale, concept in his novel Ringworld. Shortly before O'Neill proposed his cylinder, Arthur C. Clarke used such a cylinder (albeit of extraterrestrial construction) in his novel, Rendezvous with Rama.
Islands
O'Neill created three reference designs, nicknamed "islands":
Island One is a rotating sphere measuring one mile (1.6 km) in
circumference (1,681 feet (512 m) in diameter), with people living on
the equatorial region (see Bernal sphere). A later NASA/Ames study at Stanford University developed an alternative version of Island One: the Stanford torus, a toroidal shape 1,600 feet (490 m) in diameter.
Island Two is spherical in design, 5,200 feet (1,600 m) in diameter.
The Island Three design, better known as the O'Neill cylinder, consists of two counter-rotating cylinders. They are five miles (8.0 km) in diameter and are capable of being scaled up to twenty miles (32 km) long.
Each cylinder has six equal-area stripes that run the length of the
cylinder; three are transparent windows, three are habitable "land"
surfaces. Furthermore, an outer agricultural
ring, twenty miles (32 km) in diameter, rotates at a different speed to
support farming. The habitat's industrial manufacturing block is
located in the middle, to allow for minimized gravity for some
manufacturing processes.
To save the immense cost of rocketing the materials from Earth, these
habitats would be built with materials launched into space from the
Moon with a magnetic mass driver.
Design
Artificial gravity
A
NASA lunar base concept with a mass driver (the long structure that
extends toward the horizon that is a part of the plan to build O'Neill
Cylinders)
The cylinders rotate to provide artificial gravity
on their inner surface. At the radius described by O'Neill, the
habitats would have to rotate about twenty-eight times an hour to
simulate a standard Earth gravity; an angular velocity of 2.8 degrees per second. Research on human factors in rotating reference frames
indicate that, at such low rotation speeds, few people would experience motion sickness due to coriolis forces
acting on the inner ear. People would, however, be able to detect
spinward and antispinward directions by turning their heads, and any
dropped items would appear to be deflected by a few centimetres. The central axis of the habitat would be a zero-gravity region, and it was envisaged that recreational facilities could be located there.
Atmosphere and radiation
The
habitat was planned to have oxygen at partial pressures roughly similar
to terrestrial air, 20% of the Earth's sea-level air pressure. Nitrogen
would also be included to add a further 30% of the Earth's pressure.
This half-pressure atmosphere would save gas and reduce the needed
strength and thickness of the habitat walls.
Artist's depiction of the interior of an O'Neill cylinder, illuminated by reflected sunlight
At this scale, the air within the cylinder and the shell of the cylinder provide adequate shielding against cosmic rays.
The internal volume of an O'Neill cylinder is great enough to support
its own small weather systems, which may be manipulated by altering the
internal atmospheric composition or the amount of reflected sunlight.
Sunlight
Large
mirrors are hinged at the back of each stripe of window. The unhinged
edge of the windows points toward the Sun. The purpose of the mirrors is
to reflect sunlight
into the cylinders through the windows. Night is simulated by opening
the mirrors, letting the window view empty space; this also permits heat
to radiate to space. During the day, the reflected Sun appears to move
as the mirrors move, creating a natural progression of Sun angles.
Although not visible to the naked eye, the Sun's image might be observed
to rotate due to the cylinder's rotation. Light reflected by mirrors is
polarized, which might confuse pollinating bees.
To permit light to enter the habitat, large windows run the length of the cylinder.
These would not be single panes, but would be made up of many small
sections, to prevent catastrophic damage, and so the aluminum or steel
window frames can take most of the stresses of the air pressure of the
habitat.
Occasionally a meteoroid might break one of these panes. This would
cause some loss of the atmosphere, but calculations showed that this
would not be an emergency, due to the very large volume of the habitat.
Attitude control
The habitat and its mirrors must be perpetually aimed at the Sun
to collect solar energy and light the habitat's interior. O'Neill and
his students carefully worked out a method of continuously turning the
colony 360 degrees per orbit without using rockets (which would shed
reaction mass).
First, the pair of habitats can be rolled by operating the cylinders as momentum wheels.
If one habitat's rotation is slightly off, the two cylinders will
rotate about each other. Once the plane formed by the two axes of
rotation is perpendicular in the roll axis to the orbit, then the pair
of cylinders can be yawed
to aim at the Sun by exerting a force between the two sunward bearings.
Pushing the cylinders away from each other will cause both cylinders to
gyroscopically precess,
and the system will yaw in one direction, while pushing them towards
each other will cause yaw in the other direction. The counter-rotating
habitats have no net gyroscopic
effect, and so this slight precession can continue throughout the
habitat's orbit, keeping it aimed at the Sun. This is a novel
application of control moment gyroscopes.
Design update and derivatives
In
2014, a new construction method was suggested that involved inflating a
bag and taping it with a spool (constructed from asteroidal materials)
like the construction of a composite overwrapped pressure vessel.
In 1990 and 2007, a smaller design derivative known as Kalpana
One was presented, which addresses the wobbling effect of a rotating
cylinder by increasing the diameter and shortening the length. The
logistical challenges of radiation shielding are dealt with by constructing the station in low Earth orbit and removing the windows.
Proposal
At a Blue Origin event in Washington on May 9, 2019 Jeff Bezos proposed building O'Neill colonies rather than colonizing other planets.
Stanford Torus-based generation ship, proposed by Project Hyperion
A generation ship, or generation starship, is a hypothetical type of interstellar arkstarship that travels at sub-light speed.
Since such a ship might take centuries to thousands of years to reach
even nearby stars, the original occupants of a generation ship would
grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue traveling.
Origins
Rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to write about long-duration interstellar journeys in his "The Ultimate Migration" (1918). In this he described the death of the Sun and the necessity of an "interstellar ark". The crew would travel for centuries in suspended animation and be awakened when they reached another star system.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, considered a father of astronautic theory,
first described the need for multiple generations of passengers in his
essay, "The Future of Earth and Mankind" (1928), a space colony equipped
with engines that travels thousands of years which he called "Noah's
Ark".
Another early description of a generation ship is in the 1929 essay "The World, The Flesh, & The Devil" by John Desmond Bernal.
Bernal's essay was the first publication to reach the public and
influence other writers. He wrote about the concept of human evolution
and mankind's future in space through methods of living that we now
describe as a generation starship, and which could be seen in the
generic word "globes".
Definition
According
to Hein et al., a "generation ship" is a spacecraft on which a crew is
living on-board for at least several decades, such that it comprises
multiple generations. Several sub-categories of generation ships are distinguished: sprinter, slow boat, colony ship, world ship.
The Enzmann starship is categorised as "slow boat" because of the Astronomy Magazine title "Slow Boat to Centauri" (1977). Gregory Matloff's concept is called a "colony ship" and Alan Bond called his concept a "world ship". These definitions are essentially based on the velocity of the ship and population size.
Obstacles
Biosphere
Such a ship would have to be entirely self-sustaining, providing energy, food, air, and water
for everyone on board. It must also have extraordinarily reliable
systems that could be maintained by the ship's inhabitants over long
periods of time. This would require testing whether thousands of humans
could survive on their own before sending them beyond the reach of help.
Small artificial closed ecosystems, such as the Biosphere 2, have been built in an attempt to work out the engineering difficulties in such a system, with mixed results.
Biology and society
Generation ships would have to anticipate possible biological, social and morale problems, and would also need to deal with matters of self-worth and purpose for the various crews involved.
Estimates of the minimum reasonable population for a generation
ship vary. Anthropologist John Moore has estimated that, even in the
absence of cryonics or sperm banks, a population capacity of 160 people
would allow normal family life (with the average individual having ten
potential marriage partners) throughout a 200-year space journey, with
little loss of genetic diversity; social engineering can reduce this
estimate to 80 people.
In 2013 anthropologist Cameron Smith reviewed existing literature and
created a new computer model to estimate a minimum reasonable population
in the tens of thousands. Smith's numbers were much larger than
previous estimates such as Moore's, in part because Smith takes the risk
of accidents and disease into consideration, and assumes at least one
severe population catastrophe over the course of a 150-year journey.
In light of the multiple generations that it could take to reach even our nearest neighboring star systems such as Proxima Centauri, further issues on the viability of such interstellar arks include:
the possibility of humans dramatically evolving in directions unacceptable to the sponsors
the minimum population required to maintain in isolation a culture
acceptable to the sponsors; this could include such aspects as
ability to maintain and operate the ship
ability to accomplish the purpose (planetary colonization, research, building new interstellar arks) contemplated
sharing the values of the sponsors, which may not be likely to be
empirically demonstrated to be viable beyond the home planet unless,
once the ship is away from Earth and on its way, survival of one's
offspring until the ship reaches the target star is one motivation.
Size
In order for a
spacecraft to maintain a stable environment for multiple generations,
it would have to be large enough to support a community of humans and a
fully recycling ecosystem.
However, a spacecraft of such a size would require a lot of energy to
accelerate and decelerate. A smaller spacecraft, while able to
accelerate more easily and thus make higher cruise velocities more
practical, would reduce exposure to cosmic radiation and the time for
malfunctions to develop in the craft, but would have challenges with
resource metabolic flow and ecologic balance.
Social breakdown
Generation ships travelling for long periods of time may see breakdowns in social structures. Changes in society (for example, mutiny) could occur over such periods and may prevent the ship from reaching its destination. This state was described by Algis Budrys in a 1966 book review:
The slower-than-light interstellar
spaceship, pursuing its way through the weary centuries, its crew losing
touch with all reality save the interior of the vessel ... Well, you
know the story, and its unhappy downhill round, its exciting struggles
between the barbarian tribes which develop in its disparate
compartments, and then, if the writer is so minded, the ultimate flash
of hope as the good guys win out and prepare to meet their future on
some noble, if erroneous basis.
The radiation environment of deep space is very different from that
on the Earth's surface, or in low earth orbit, due to the much larger
influx of high-energy galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). Like other ionizing radiation, high-energy cosmic rays can damage DNA and increase the risk of cancer, cataracts, and neurological disorders.
One known practical solution to this problem is surrounding the crewed
parts of the ship with a thick enough shielding such as a thick layer of
maintained ice as proposed in The Songs of Distant Earth, a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke
(note: in this book the ship's mammoth ice shield is only in the
forward part of the ship, preventing micrometeors from damaging the ship
during its interstellar journey).
Ethical considerations
The
success of a generation ship depends on children born aboard taking
over the necessary duties, as well as having children themselves. Even
if their quality of life might be better than, for example, that of
people born into poverty on Earth, philosophy professor Neil Levy has
raised the question of whether it is ethical to severely constrain life
choices of individuals by locking them into a project they did not
choose.
A moral quandary exists regarding how intermediate generations, those
destined to be born and die in transit without actually seeing tangible
results of their efforts, might feel about their forced existence on
such a ship.
Project Hyperion
Project Hyperion,
launched in December 2011 by Icarus Interstellar, was to perform a
preliminary study that defines integrated concepts for a crewed
interstellar generation ship. This was a two-year study mainly based out
of the WARR student group at the Technical University of Munich.
The study aimed to provide an assessment of the feasibility of crewed
interstellar flight using current and near-future technologies. It also
aimed to guide future research and technology development plans as well
as to inform the public about crewed interstellar travel. Notable results of the project include an assessment of world ship system architectures and adequate population size. The core team members have transferred to the Initiative for Interstellar Studies's world ship project and a survey paper on generation ships has been presented at the ESA Interstellar Workshop in 2019 as well as in ESA's Acta Futura journal.
Mind uploading, whole brain emulation, or substrate-independent minds, is a use of a computer or another substrate as an emulated human brain.
The term "mind transfer" also refers to a hypothetical transfer of a
mind from one biological brain to another. Uploaded minds and societies
of minds, often in simulated realities, are recurring themes in science-fiction novels and films since the 1950s.
Early and particularly important examples
A
story featuring an artificial brain that replicates the personality of a
specific person is "The Infinite Brain" by John Scott Campbell, written
under the name John C. Campbell, and published in the May 1930 issue of Science Wonder Stories.
The artificial brain is created by an inventor named Anton Des Roubles,
who tells the narrator that "I am attempting to construct a mechanism
exactly duplicating the mechanical and electrical processes occurring in
the human brain and constituting the phenomena known as thought."
The narrator later learns that Des Roubles has died, and on visiting
his laboratory, finds a machine that can communicate with him via typed
messages, and which tells him "I, Anton Des Roubles, am dead—my body is
dead—but I still live. I am this machine. These racks of apparatus are
my brains, which is thinking even as yours is. Anton Des Roubles is dead
but he has built me, his exact mental duplicate, to carry on his life
and work." The machine also tells him "He made my brain precisely like
his, built three hundred thousand cells for my memory, and filled two
hundred thousand of them with his own knowledge. I have his personality;
it is my own through a process I will tell you of later. ... I think
just as you do. I have a consciousness as have other men." He then
explains his discovery that the electrical impulses in the brain create
magnetic fields that can be detected by a device he built called a
"Telepather", and that "[t]hrough this instrument any one's mental
condition can be exactly duplicated." Later, he enlists the narrator's
help in constructing a new type of artificial brain that will retain his
memories but possess an expanded intellect, though the experiment does
not go as planned, as the new intelligence has a radically different
personality and soon sets out to conquer the world.
An early story featuring technological transfer of memories and
personality from one brain to another is "Intelligence Undying" by Edmond Hamilton, first published in the April 1936 issue of Amazing Stories.
In this story, an elderly scientist named John Hanley explains that
when humans are first born, "our minds are a blank sheet except for
certain reflexes which we all inherit. But from our birth onward, our
minds are affected by all about us, our reflexes are conditioned, as the
behaviorists
say. All we experience is printed on the sheet of our minds. ...
Everything a human being learns, therefore, simply establishes new
connections between the nerve cells of the brain. ... As I said, a
newborn child has no such knowledge connections in his cortex at all—he
has not yet formed any. Now if I take that child immediately after birth
and establish in his brain exactly the same web of intricate neurone
connections I have built up in my own brain, he will have exactly the
same mind, memories, knowledge, as I have ... his mind will be exactly
identical with my mind!" He then explains he has developed a technique
to do just this, saying "I've devised a way to scan my brain's
intricate web of neurone connections by electrical impulses, and by
means of those impulses to build up an exactly identical web of neurone
connections in the infant's brain. Just as a television scanning-disk
can break down a complicated picture into impulses that reproduce the
picture elsewhere." He adds that the impulses scanning his brain will
kill him, but the "counter-impulses" imprinting the same pattern on the
baby's brain will not harm him. The story shows the successful transfer
of John Hanley's mind to the baby, whom he describes as "John Hanley
2nd", and then skips forward to the year 3144 to depict "John Hanley,
21st" using his advanced technology to become the ruler of the Earth in
order to end a war between the two great political powers of the time,
and then further ahead to "John Hanley, 416th" helping to evacuate
humanity to the planet Mercury in response to the Sun shrinking into a white dwarf.
He chooses to remain on Earth awaiting death, so that people would
"learn once more to do for themselves, would become again a strong a
self-reliant race", with Hanley concluding that he "had been wrong in
living as a single super-mind down through the ages. He saw that now,
and now he was undoing that wrong."
A story featuring human minds replicated in a computer is the novella Izzard and the Membrane by Walter M. Miller, Jr., first published in May 1951.
In this story, an American cyberneticist named Scott MacDonney is
captured by Russians and made to work on an advanced computer, Izzard,
which they plan to use to coordinate an attack on the United States. He
has conversations with Izzard as he works on it, and when he asks it if
it is self-aware, it says "answer indeterminate" and then asks "can
human individual's self-awareness transor be mechanically duplicated?"
MacDonney is unfamiliar with the concept of a self-awareness transor (it
is later revealed that this information was loaded into Izzard by a
mysterious entity who may nor may not be God),
and Izzard defines it by saying "A self-awareness transor is the
mathematical function which describes the specific consciousness pattern
of one human individual."
It is later found that this mathematical function can indeed be
duplicated, although not by a detailed scan of the individual's brain as
in later notions of mind uploading; instead, Donney just has to
describe the individual verbally in sufficient detail, and Izzard uses
this information to locate the transor in the appropriate "mathematical
region". In Izzard's words, "to duplicate consciousness of deceased, it
will be necessary for you to furnish anthropometric and psychic
characteristics of the individual. These characteristics will not
determine transor, but will only give its general form. Knowing its
form, will enable me to sweep my circuit pattern through its
mathematical region until the proper transor is reached. At that point,
the consciousness will appear among the circuits."
Using this method, MacDonney is able to recreate the mind of his dead
wife in Izzard's memory, as well as create a virtual duplicate of
himself, which seems to have a shared awareness with the biological
MacDonney.
In The Altered Ego by Jerry Sohl (1954), a person's mind
can be "recorded" and used to create a "restoration" in the event of
their death. In a restoration, the person's biological body is repaired
and brought back to life, and their memories are restored to the last
time that they had their minds recorded (what the story calls a 'brain
record'),
an early example of a story in which a person can create periodic
backups of their own mind which are stored in an artificial medium. The
recording process is not described in great detail, but it is mentioned
that the recording is used to create a duplicate or "dupe" which is
stored in the "restoration bank",
and at one point a lecturer says that "The experience of the years, the
neurograms, simple memory circuits—neurons, if you wish—stored among
these nerve cells, are transferred to the dupe, a group of more than ten
billion molecules in colloidal suspension.
They are charged much as you would charge the plates of a battery, the
small neuroelectrical impulses emanating from your brain during the
recording session being duplicated on the molecular structure in the
solution." During restoration, they take the dupe and "infuse it into an empty brain", and the plot turns on the fact that it is possible to install one person's dupe in the body of a completely different person.
An early example featuring uploaded minds in robotic bodies can be found in Frederik Pohl's story "The Tunnel Under the World" from 1955.
In this story, the protagonist Guy Burckhardt continually wakes up on
the same date from a dream of dying in an explosion. Burckhardt is
already familiar with the idea of putting human minds in robotic bodies,
since this is what is done with the robot workers at the nearby Contro
Chemical factory. As someone has once explained it to him, "each machine
was controlled by a sort of computer which reproduced, in its
electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a human being ... It was
only a matter, he said, of transferring a man's habit patterns from
brain cells to vacuum-tube cells." Later in the story, Pohl gives some
additional description of the procedure: "Take a master petroleum
chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its
fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching
electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind,
translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same
waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand
copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and
skill, and no human limitations at all." After some investigation,
Burckhardt learns that his entire town had been killed in a chemical
explosion, and the brains of the dead townspeople had been scanned and
placed into miniature robotic bodies in a miniature replica of the town
(as a character explains to him, 'It's as easy to transfer a pattern
from a dead brain as a living one'), so that a businessman named Mr.
Dorchin could charge companies to use the townspeople as test subjects
for new products and advertisements.
Something close to the notion of mind uploading is very briefly mentioned in Isaac Asimov's 1956 short story The Last Question: "One by one Man fused with AC,
each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was
somehow not a loss but a gain." A more detailed exploration of the idea
(and one in which individual identity is preserved, unlike in Asimov's
story) can be found in Arthur C. Clarke's novel The City and the Stars, also from 1956 (this novel was a revised and expanded version of Clarke's earlier story Against the Fall of Night,
but the earlier version did not contain the elements relating to mind
uploading). The story is set in a city named Diaspar one billion years
in the future, where the minds of inhabitants are stored as patterns of
information in the city's Central Computer in between a series of
1000-year lives in cloned bodies. Various commentators identify this
story as one of the first (if not the first) to deal with mind
uploading, human-machine synthesis, and computerized immortality.
Another of the "firsts" is the novel Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968, by the renowned philosopher and logician Bertil Mårtensson,
a novel in which he describes people living in an uploaded state as a
means to control overpopulation. The uploaded people believe that they
are "alive", but in reality they are playing elaborate and advanced
fantasy games. In a twist at the end, the author changes everything into
one of the best "multiverse" ideas of science fiction.
In Robert Silverberg's To Live Again
(1969), an entire worldwide economy is built up around the buying and
selling of "souls" (personas that have been tape-recorded at six-month
intervals), allowing well-heeled consumers the opportunity to spend tens
of millions of dollars on a medical treatment that uploads the most
recent recordings of archived personalities into the minds of the
buyers. Federal law prevents people from buying a "personality
recording" unless the possessor first had died; similarly, two or more
buyers were not allowed to own a "share" of the persona. In this novel,
the personality recording always went to the highest bidder. However,
when one attempted to buy (and therefore possess) too many
personalities, there was the risk that one of the personas would wrest
control of the body from the possessor.
In the 1982 novel Software, part of the Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker, one of the main characters, Cobb Anderson, has his mind downloaded and his body replaced with an extremely human-like android body. The robots who persuade Anderson into doing this sell the process to him as a way to become immortal.
In William Gibson's award-winning Neuromancer
(1984), which popularized the concept of "cyberspace", a hacking tool
used by the main character is an artificial infomorph of a notorious
cyber-criminal, Dixie Flatline. The infomorph only assists in exchange for the promise that he be deleted after the mission is complete.
The fiction of Greg Egan
has explored many of the philosophical, ethical, legal, and identity
aspects of mind transfer, as well as the financial and computing aspects
(i.e. hardware, software, processing power) of maintaining "copies." In
Egan's Permutation City (1994), Diaspora (1997) and Zendegi
(2010), "copies" are made by computer simulation of scanned brain
physiology. See also Egan's "jewelhead" stories, where the mind is
transferred from the organic brain to a small, immortal backup computer
at the base of the skull, the organic brain then being surgically
removed.
The movie The Matrix is commonly mistaken for a mind uploading movie, but with exception to suggestions in later movies, it is only about virtual reality and simulated reality,
since the main character Neo's physical brain still is required for his
mind to reside in. The mind (the information content of the brain) is
not copied into an emulated brain in a computer. Neo's physical brain is
connected into the Matrix via a brain-machine interface. Only the rest of the physical body is simulated. Neo is disconnected from and reconnected to this dreamworld.
James Cameron's 2009 movie Avatar
has so far been the commercially most successful example of a work of
fiction that features a form of mind uploading. Throughout most of the
movie, the hero's mind has not actually been uploaded and transferred to
another body, but is simply controlling the body from a distance, a
form of telepresence.
However, at the end of the movie the hero's mind is uploaded into Eywa,
the mind of the planet, and then back into his Avatar body.
Further examples
Mind
transfer is a theme in many other works of science fiction in a wide
range of media. Specific examples include the following:
In the Noon Universe created by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the Great Encoding of 2121
was the first known attempt to completely store an individual's
personality on an artificial medium. The final stages of the Encoding
are described in the chapter 14 of Noon: 22nd Century (Candles Before the Control Board), first published in 1961.
Clifford D. Simak's Hugo-shortlisted novel Time is the Simplest Thing
(1961) is based around mind copying and uploading. The initial swap
involves 'the Pinkness' giving 'Shep Blaine' a very large number of
minds that it has collected over the aeons in exchange for a copy of his
mind.
Philip José Farmer's World of Tiers series (1965–1993) introduces the villainous Bellers,
who were laboratory machines designed to temporarily hold Lord's
consciousness between clone bodies, which became sentient and self
replicating.onto a Holopox unit shortly before being nuked by the KGB.
In Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light (1967), the characters can technologically "transmigrate" their minds into new bodies.
In Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), the beings controlling the monoliths were once alien lifeforms
that had uploaded their minds into robotic bodies and finally into the
fabric of space and time itself. The character Dave Bowman undergoes an
uploading from the body of a human into a "ghost", as he is described in
later books.
Bertil Mårtensson's novel Detta är verkligheten (This is reality), 1968. See above article for details.
Gene Wolfe's novella The Fifth Head of Cerberus
(1972) features a robot named "Mr. Million" whose mind is an uploaded
version of the original man who the narrator ('Number Five') was cloned
from, and who acts as the narrator's tutor.
John Sladek's satirical The Muller-Fokker Effect (1973), in which a human mind could be recorded on cassette tapes and then imprinted on a human body using tailored viruses.
In an interesting reversal of the typical mind-transfer story, in Robert A Heinlein's Time Enough for Love (1973) a sentient computer transfers "her" mind into a genetically engineered human body.
In James P. Hogan's The Giants
novels (1977–2005), stable FTL travel takes weeks if not months, so
people upload their minds into an intergalactic network controlled by
the AI known as VISAR. The network also supports a large series of
virtual worlds for people to interact.
Michael Berlyn's The Integrated Man
(1980), where a human mind, or part of it (or even just a set of
skills) can be encoded on a chip and inserted into a special socket at
the base of the brain.
In Heroes Unlimited
(1984) under the Robot category, a human pilot has a transferred
intelligence category that transfers a human intelligence over a
distance into the body of a robot. This option is also available in Rifts Sourcebook 1. In either case it can be permanent.
Frederik Pohl's novel Heechee Rendezvous (1984) was the first in his Heechee
series in which the protagonist Robinette Broadhead had been uploaded
into a computer after his death. The technology was first introduced in
Pohl's previous novel in the Gateway tetralogy, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1982)
Larry Niven
deals with mind-transfer in his short stories: memories from
'corpsicles' (cryogenically frozen bodies) are transferred to mindwiped
criminals. In the novels The Smoke Ring (1987) and The Integral Trees (1984), a human is voluntarily 'translated' into a computer program to operate as a starship's guiding intelligence.
Greg Bear's novel Eternity
(1988) features a main character discovering a captured uploaded mind
of a type of alien called a "Jart", whose civilization is later
discovered to have the goal of uploading and digitizing as many minds
and life-forms as possible with the hope of preserving them in a future
"Final Mind" similar to Teilhard or Tipler's conception of the Omega Point. The story also features Bear's notion of the Taylor algorithms
which allow a mentality to discover what type of system it is running
on (for example, Bear writes on p. 109 that with these algorithms, "a
downloaded mentality could tell whether or not it had been downloaded").
Janet Asimov's Mind Transfer
(1988) journeys through the birth, life, death, and second life of a
man whose family pioneers human-to-android mind transfer. It also
explores the ethical and moral issues of transferring consciousness into
an android at the moment of death, and examines the idea of prematurely
activating an android which has not yet accepted a human brain scan.
Several characters in Kyle Allen's The Archon Conspiracy (1989) are repeatedly killed and resurrected in prosthetic bodies, once a "pattern map" of their brains is recovered and hard-wired into an artificial neural net. The main antagonist uses a similar process to construct a memeticcomputer virus, in the process uploading the personality of a notorious serial killer into several thousand people.
Peter James' Host
(1993). A group of scientists is researching the feasibility of the
upload to achieve immortality. Unfortunately it turns out that there are
some unforeseen problems with the combination of human emotions and the
power to use computers and the internet to manipulate the real world.
In the novel Feersum Endjinn (1994) by Iain M. Banks,
the minds of the dead are uploaded into a computer network known as
"the data corpus", "cryptosphere" or simply "crypt", allowing them to be
routinely reincarnated. The story revolves around two characters who
are trying to reactivate a piece of ancient technology, the "Fearsome
Engine", which can prevent the Sun from dimming to the point where life
on Earth becomes extinct.
In Endgame (1996), the last novel of the Doom series by Dafydd Ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver,
the alien race known as Newbies attempts to transfer Fly Taggart's and
Arlene Sanders's souls to a computer simulation based on their memories.
However, due to difference between "formats" of human soul and soul of
any other being in the galaxy, they accidentally copied their soul, with
one copy trapped in the simulation and the other left in their bodies.
In Garth Nix's Shade's Children (1997), Shade is an uploaded consciousness acting in loco parentis
to teenagers to help save them from evil Overlords. Shade contemplates
at times how human he is, especially as his personality degenerates
during the story; and whether or not he should have a new human body.
In Charles Platt's novel The Silicon Man
(1997), an FBI agent who has stumbled on a top-secret project called
LifeScan is destructively uploaded against his will. Realistically
describes the constraints of the process and machinery.
Tad Williams's Otherland series (1998–2002) concerns the activities of a secret society whose goals include creating a virtual reality network where they will be uploaded and in which they will live as gods. Otherland
contains a very hard SF approach to the topic, but balances the hard
approach with fantastical adventures of the protagonists within the
virtual reality network.
Gene Wolfe's trilogy The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001) features an old generation starship called the Whorl which is run by a group of uploaded rulers who have set themselves up as gods. Once the Whorl
arrives at a star system with habitable planets, they send giant
"godlings" to the humans on board to encourage them to depart the ship.
In Abduction (2000) by Robin Cook, a group of researchers discover an underwater civilization which achieved immortality by transferring their minds into cloned bodies.
In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe
(2000–), a complete and functioning copy of the mind is described as an
alpha-level simulation while a non-sentient copy of the mind based on
predictive behavioural pattern of a person's mind is described as a
beta-level simulation.
In Eater (2000) by Gregory Benford,
mind-uploading (or consciousness-uploading) is a "demand" of the major
antagonist, which is a "magnetic intelligence" (composed of similarly
encoded minds) anchored on the event horizon of a black hole. The major
character's wife, who is dying of cancer, has her consciousness uploaded
into a computer and mounts an attack on the entity, achieving a type of
immortality in the process.
Kiln People (2002) by David Brin
postulates a future where people can create clay duplicates of
themselves with all their memories up to that time. The duplicates only
last 24 hours, and the original can then choose whether or not to upload
the ditto's memories back into himself afterward. Most people use
dittos to do their work.
Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon (2002) and other Takeshi Kovacs
books, where everyone has a "cortical stack" implanted at the base of
their skull, soon after being born. The device then records all your
memories and experiences in real-time. The stack can be "resleeved" in
another body, be it a clone or otherwise, and/or backed up digitally at a
remote location.
Jim Munroe's novel Everyone in Silico
(2002) is set in Vancouver in 2036; people can upload to a virtual
world called Frisco which is loosely based on the now submerged city of
San Francisco.
Vernor Vinge's novella The Cookie Monster
(2003) explores the possibility of mind uploads who are not aware they
have been uploaded, and who are kept as unknowing slaves doing technical
research in a simulation running at high speed relative to the outside
world.
In Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
(2003), the plot is set in motion when the main character is killed and
"restored from backup", a process which entails the creation of a clone
and flashing the clone's brain with an image stored on a computer.
Robert J. Sawyer's novel Mindscan
(2005) deals with the issue of uploaded consciousness from the
perspective of Jake Sullivan: both of them. The human Jake has a rare,
life-threatening disease and to extend his life he decides to upload his
consciousness into a robotic body; but things don't go quite as
planned.
In the Old Man's War series (2005–) by John Scalzi,
the minds of volunteer retirees are transferred to younger, genetically
enhanced versions of themselves in order to enable them to fight for
the Colonial Defence Forces (CDF). In The Android's Dream, two characters' minds are uploaded onto computers.
In The Battle of the Labyrinth (2008) by Rick Riordan, Daedalus/Quintus transfers his mind to an automaton by means of a combination of mechanics and magic.
The book and podcast novel series 7th Son (2009) from JC
Hutchins focuses purely on mind uploading and cloning. Combining two
ethically situational sciences and turning it into a thriller series
when a terrorist clone can copy his consciousness to other people's
minds.
In Peter F. Hamilton's Void Trilogy (2007–2010) humans are able to upload into the machine intelligence known as ANA. The same theme is found in P F Hamilton's Mindstar Rising (1993) in which an industrialist's mind is also uploaded to a storage device.
Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief series (2010–2014), which includes the novels The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel, describes a posthuman world where uploaded minds (named gogols)
are widely used as intellectual software utilized for various purposes
including data analysis, planning and control of embedded systems.
Clyde Dsouza's Memories with Maya (2013) looks at how deep learning
processes, and 'Digital Breadcrumbs' left behind by people (tweets,
Facebook updates, blogs) combined with memories of living relatives can
be used to re-construct a mind and augment it with narrow AI libraries. The resulting 'Dirrogate' or Digital Surrogate can be thought of as a posthumous mind upload.
David T. Wolf's
novel, "Mindclone," describes the first successful brain scan and
upload, creating a digital twin of Marc Gregorio, a science writer.
Alternating between the points of view of the human and his digital
twin, the novel explores the technology and its consequences as the pair
establishes a friendly rivalry, and cooperates to fend off an
avaricious government contractor. (2013)
Damien Boyes's series Lost Time (2015-), features characters
whose minds are uploaded and digitally restored into artificial bodies.
The series explores the emotional, legal, philosophical, and societal
ramifications of mind uploading technology.
In the novel So Far Out to Sea by Dane St. John (2016), the
visionary Abraham Trevis must locate a habitable exoplanet and plot out a
journey to get there, in which he plans to use an experimental process
called "relocation" to allow humans to survive the inhospitable forces
of space and time – it consists of specialized nanotechnology called
"architects", engineered for the purpose of replicating neurons and all
individual experiences, learnings, and emotional traits.
In Steve Toutonghi's 2016 novel, Join, people are able to
fuse their individual psyches into shared collective consciousnesses—a
shared identity known as a join—in order to live multiple lives
simultaneously, enjoy perfect companionship, and never die.
In Adrian Tchaikovsky's novel Children of Time (2016) both Dr. Avrana Kern and Gilgamesh Captain Vrie Guyen experiment with whole brain emulation with varied degrees of success.
Dennis E. Taylor's Bobiverse
series (2016–Present) follows a 21st-century man named Bob whose
consciousness has been uploaded and copied into many "replicants". These
computerized clones then explore the galaxy while struggling with
whether they are still human, or simply machines.
In Neal Stephenson's Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
a software billionaire's brain is destructively scanned and then
emulated in a massive cloud computing simulation. The story is told
partially in contemporary real space and also in the simulation space
which may exhibit different perceived timescales for the simulated
consciousnesses.
Film
In the film The Creation of the Humanoids
(1962), set in the future after a nuclear war, the blue-skinned
androids known as "humanoids" are trying to infiltrate human society by
creating android replicas of humans that have recently died, using a
procedure called a "thalamic transplant" to take the memories and
personality of the recently deceased human and place them in the
replicas.
In the 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture,
the entity that calls itself V'Ger is a heavily modified Earth space
probe that is capable of converting lifeforms and objects such as
spacecraft into digitized "data patterns", which can then be represented
in holographic or even physical form. The best example of this is when a
probe from V'Ger kills the Starship Enterprise's
navigator, Lieutenant Ilia, and then generates a mechanized duplicate
of her to act as its representative to the Enterprise crew. In the film,
it is stated that the duplicate is so detailed as to simulate humanoid
biological functions, as well as contain the original Ilia's memory
patterns, which the crew attempts to uncover in order to better
understand V'Ger's motives.
In the film Tron
(1982), human programmer Flynn is digitized by an artificial
intelligence called the "Master Control Program", bringing him inside
the virtual world of the computer.
Mamoru Oshii/Masamune Shirow's anime/mangaGhost in the Shell
(1989–) portrays a future world in which human beings aggressively
mechanize, replacing body and mind with interfacing
mechanical/computer/electrical parts, often to the point of complete
mechanization/replacement of all original material. Its sequel, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence deals heavily with the philosophical ramifications of this problem.
In the film Robotrix
(1991), a criminally insane scientist, Ryuichi Sakamoto, transfers his
mind into a cyborg and immediately commits a series of rapes and
murders. Among his victims is female police officer Selena Lam. The
scientist Dr. Sara transfers Selena's mind into a cyborg named Eve-27,
then copies her own persona into a robotic assistant named Ann. The
cyborg-robot team pursue the criminal Sakamoto by investigating a series
of murdered prostitutes.
The film The Lawnmower Man
(1992) deals with attempts by scientists to boost the intelligence of a
man named Jobe using a program of accelerated learning, using nootropic drugs, virtual reality input, and cortex
stimulation. After becoming superintelligent, Jobe finds a way to
transfer his mind completely into virtual reality, leaving his physical
body as a wizened husk.
The film Freejack
(1992) describes a future where the wealthy can seize people out of the
past, moments before their death, and transfer their own mind &
consciousness to the newly captured body, at the expense of that
person's mind. A "freejack" is what an escapee of this process is
called. The computer equipment which stores a mind temporarily while it
awaits transplant is referred to as "the spiritual switchboard".
The Thirteenth Floor (1999) is set in late 1990s Los Angeles, where Hannon owns a multibillion-dollar computer enterprise, and is the inventor of a newly completed virtual reality (VR) simulation of 1937 Los Angeles. But Hannon dies and his protégé eventually discovers that the 1990s Los Angeles itself is a simulation.
In the film The 6th Day (2000), the contents of a brain can be downloaded via the optic nerves, and copied to clones.
Chrysalis,
a 2007 French movie about an experimental machine capable of partially
uploading minds. Minds cannot function in purely digital form, they must
be placed back into a human container.
The central conceit of the 2009 science fiction film Avatar
is that human consciousness can be used to control genetically grown
bodies (Avatars) based on the native inhabitants of an alien world, in
order to integrate into their society. This is not true mind uploading,
as the humans only control the Avatars remotely (a form of telepresence),
but later in the film Grace connects with Eywa (the collective
consciousness of the planet) so her mind can be permanently transferred
to her Avatar body. Her mind is uploaded to Eywa, but she does not
return to her Avatar body and stays within the Tree of Souls. At the end
of the film, Jake's mind is uploaded to Eywa and successfully returns
to his Avatar body leaving his human body lifeless. The basis for this
type of transfer is not explained in detail, but it seems to have a
physical basis rather than being something more mystical, given that
Grace had earlier described Eywa as a "global network" (like a neural network) made up of electrochemical "connections" (which she said were "like the synapses
between neurons") between the roots of trees, and also said that "the
Na'vi can access it—they can upload and download data—memories".
In the 2014 movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Arnim Zola, a biochemist for HYDRA
developed a terminal disease and he transferred his consciousness to a
giant computer that took up the entire area of an old, abandoned S.H.I.E.L.D. facility in New Jersey.
In the 2014 movie Transcendence,
Dr. Will Caster, an artificial intelligence researcher, is assassinated
with a bullet laced with radioactive material and has his consciousness
uploaded to several quantum processors (and eventually the internet) in
order for him to survive in a digital form.
In the 2015 movie CHAPPiE the title character Chappie transfers the dying Deon's consciousness into a spare robot through a modified neural helmet.
In the 2015 film Advantageous,
Gwen Koh is made to choose between having her consciousness transferred
to a different body in order to keep her job as the face of a
technology company or not having the resources to give her daughter the
education that will maintain her position in a socially and economically
stratified society.
In the 2015 film Self/less
the super wealthy are offered the extension of their lives through the
transfer of their minds into what are presented as cloned bodies, but
are actually humans whose memories are overwritten and suppressed.
In the 2018 film Replicas
a researcher working on creating synthetic robot brains copies his
family's minds into cloned human bodies after they are killed in a car
accident, in-order to bring them back to life. However, although their
minds are copied into cloned bodies, their minds are first uploaded into
storage devices called Mem-Drives capable of storing the entire
contents of a human brain, until their minds can then later (only after
the cloned bodies that first have to be grown are finished maturing) be
transferred subsequently into the cloned human bodies. This film also
deals with the concept of Mind uploading (into fully artificial robot
bodies) as that is exactly what the primary character in the film is trying to accomplish, from nearly the very beginning of the film.
Television
In Galaxy Express 999
(1978), people can achieve effective immortality by transferring their
minds into android bodies, if they are wealthy enough to afford them.
The main character is set on this as his supreme aspiration in life, but
slowly comes to appreciate that it is not quite the panacea he had been
led to believe it was.
In the 1985 TV movieMax Headroom and ABC Television series, TV reporter Edison Carter is copied into Network 23's computers creating the TV personality Max Headroom.
Red Dwarf
(1988–1999), where a person's memories and personality can be recorded
in just a few seconds and, upon their death, they can be recreated as a holographic simulation. Arnold Rimmer is an example of such a person.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation season 2 episode 6 "The Schizoid Man" (1989), Dr Ira Graves uploads his mind into Data's positronic brain. He later downloads his memories into the Enterprise's computer, although his personality has been lost, and his memories reduced to raw data of events.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation season 7 episode 10 "Inheritance" (1994), Data encounters his "mother" who unknown to her, had her mind scanned by synaptic scanner by her husband (and Datas
"father") Dr Noonien Soong. This was done while she was unconscious,
and days before her death an exact copy of her brain was transferred to a
positronic matrix, inside a gynoid body (but labeled android body on
the show).
In Battle Angel Alita (1990–, also known as Gunnm),
a closely guarded secret of the elite city of Tiphares/Zalem is that
its citizens, after being eugenically screened and rigorously tested in a
maturity ritual, have their brains scanned, removed and replaced with
chips. When this is revealed to a Tipharean/Zalem citizen, the
internalized philosophical debate causes most citizens to go insane.
In the Phantom 2040 TV series (1994–) and videogame
(1995), Maxwell Madison Sr., the husband of one of the series' main
antagonists Rebecca Madison, is killed during a train wreck with the
23rd Phantom
and his brainwaves are uploaded onto a computer mainframe. Rebecca
plans to download his brainwaves into a living or artificial body to
bring him back to life.
The second of the four TekWar TV movies, titled "TekLords" (1994), featured the uploaded intelligence of a drug lord's sister, who had been killed in an attempt on his life.
The antagonist of the M.A.N.T.I.S.
episode "Switches" (1995) is a mad scientist on death row, who has
designed a device which will upload his mind into the power grid. The
device is activated when the scientist is executed in an electric chair. He is thwarted in his attempt to subject his ex-girlfriend to the same process.
In Yu-Gi-Oh! (1996–), Noah Kaiba died in a car accident and his mind was uploaded to a supercomputer.
In the TV series Stargate SG-1 (1997–2007), the Asgard cheat death by transferring their minds into new clone bodies. The mind of Thor, the high commander of the Asgard
fleet, was for a time transferred into the computer of a Goa'uld
spaceship. In the episode "Tin Man" (1998), the SG-1 team visit a
warehouse of an extinct alien civilization, where the android caretaker
scans their minds and builds android duplicates of the team, who are
unaware that they aren't the originals until they find their original
bodies in suspended animation. In "Holiday" (1999) Dr. Daniel Jackson's
mind is transferred into Machello's body and vice versa. In "Entity"
(2001) Samantha Carter's mind is transferred into a computer. In
"Lifeboat" (2003) around 12 minds are transferred into and then out of
Daniel Jackson's body. In the two-part opening of season 8, "New Order" (2004), Jack O'Neill's mind is fully interfaced with the main computer of Thor's ship.
In the TV series Stargate Atlantis,
after being infected with Asuran (Replicator) Nanites, Dr. Weir is
capable of accessing and uploading herself in the Asuran collective
network.
In the TV series Stargate Universe,
the consciousnesses of a number of deceased characters are uploaded to
the Destiny's main computer, where they exist as live computer programs
which can interact with the crew via induced audiovisual hallucinations.
Cowboy Bebop
episode 23 "Brain Scratch" (1999) is about a cult dedicated towards
electronic transference of the mind into a computer network.
In the French animated series Code Lyoko (2003–), the primary characters use devices called Scanners that read the entire physical makeup of the user, digitize their atoms and then teleport the user onto the virtual world of Lyoko.
In the television series Caprica (2009–2010), a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, the ability to upload human consciousnesses into a virtual reality world is featured prominently. (Battlestar Galactica
did not itself feature true mind uploading, since the cylons were
artificial intelligences that were not based on ordinary human brains,
though their minds could be transferred from one body to another in the
same manner as is often envisioned for uploads.) While some characters
believe that the process only creates an imperfect copy of the original
person, as the death of the original consciousness is unnecessary for
the creation of the virtual copy, other characters believe that it can
be viewed as a form of religious rebirth analogous to the afterlife.
Mind transfer is a central theme in the television series Dollhouse (2009–2010).
In the anime series Serial Experiments Lain,
the antagonist Masami Eiri embeds his memories and consciousness into
the "Wired", the internet of the story universe. He believed that
humanity should evolve by ridding themselves of their physical
limitations and live as digital entities only.
In the second installment of the story The Trial of a Time Lord in the original Doctor Who
series, the Doctor's assistant Perpugilliam Brown has her mind erased,
and replaced with the mind of the dying Lord Kiv of the Mentors. The
storyline mentions that this is the first time the entire mind of an
individual can be transplanted from one body to another. It is a pivotal
moment in the history of the series as it is the purported reason that
the Time Lords took the Doctor out of time and placed him on trial. It
was later shown to be false evidence in the Doctor's trial.
In the episode Silence in the Library of the 2005 revival of the British television show Doctor WhoDonna Noble
is "saved" by the computer Cal where she joins several others inside
the computer that had been saved previously. Arguably the process of
saving the individuals is more involved then simple mind uploading as
the teleportation patterns of the individuals are also stored and the
Doctor is able in the next episode Forest of the Dead to get Cal to return them to the physical world. However, also in Forest of the Dead, the character of River Song,
is killed but the doctor is able, using a future Doctor's sonic
screwdriver to upload River's consciousness into Cal thus extending her
life indefinitely.
In the episode "13.1" of the show Warehouse 13, former Warehouse Agent Hugo Miller's
hologram appears when an attempt is made to upgrade the computer
systems inside the Warehouse. In fear of being deleted during the
upgrade, Hugo locks down the entire Warehouse and attempts to kill
everyone inside. Hugo's hologram is later identified as a portion of
the agent's mind in which he uploaded onto the Warehouse computers using
an artifact, but something went wrong during the transfer and only
certain parts of his mind went into the computer, leaving the other
parts in Hugo's biological mind. Having only half of an actual brain
renders him insane and he is put into an asylum until he is later
retrieved by Pete and Myka to reverse what the artifact has done, thus
making him a whole person again and deleting the holographic and
homicidal half version of Hugo in the Warehouse 13 computer systems.
The 2014 episode "White Christmas" of the British TV show Black Mirror
features a procedure where copies of living subjects' minds are
uploaded to "cookies", devices capable of running full brain emulation,
and then used for household control jobs, judicial investigation, and
criminal sentencing. An operator can also adjust the cookie speed to
make the emulated mind experiment a different time scale, a feature used
to apply a thousand-year long sentence to an individual's mind, which
is served in a few hours of real-world time.
In the 2014 episode "Days of Future Future" of the Simpsons, Professor Frink loads Homer's
brain onto a USB-Stick and then brings him to life in a digital
environment with his head being shown on (the future equivalents of)
"TV"-screens, digital photo frames and computer screens between which
Homer can move freely and engage in screensavers and video games. Later Bart buys him a "robot body" (similar to the Surrogates in the movie Surrogates) which he plugs into the "TV" upon which it conflates and Homer's head moves from the screen over to the physical robot.
In Westworld
(2016), the eponymous theme park is run with the purpose of
digitalizing consciousness in order to achieve immortality. This is done
by analyzing the human guests' behaviors and adjusting their digital
representation until it reacts in the same way as the guest to any given
stimulus.
In season 3 of The 100
(2014-2020), which aired in 2016, an AI device known as The Flame is
introduced. This device requires merging with a human brain, and is
passed down (over many years) to each new Commander of the Grounders,
aka Heda. Each new Commander has access to (the ability to see and speak
to) all of the prior Commanders, as their minds live on after their
deaths, due to being uploaded and saved within The Flame.
Altered Carbon
(2018) is based on the premise that "More than 300 years in the future,
society has been transformed by new technology, leading to human bodies
being interchangeable and death no longer being permanent."
In season 6 of The 100
(2014-2020), which aired in 2019, a group of colonists from Earth
inhabited an Earthlike planet called Sanctum. They developed the
technology to download the human mind to a drive and upload it to
another human being. In order to achieve this, they also developed the
technology to wipe the mind of a human being while keeping the brain
intact. After wiping the mind of the victim, they could then insert the
mind drive into the body and upload the consciousness of the downloaded
mind, effectively allowing human consciousness to live forever in
different bodies.
In Star Trek: Picard (2020), protagonist Jean-Luc Picard's
consciousness is transferred to an android body upon his human body's
death. Knowing that Picard would not want to be immortal, creator Altan
Intigo Soong and La Sirena crew members Soji Asha and Agnes
Jurati deliberately limit his new lifespan to what it would have been
without the brain defect that killed him.
The 2010 instalment Tensou Sentai Goseiger featured the Matrintis leader Robogorg of the 10-sai,
who was once a human scientist that transferred his brain into a
Matroid body after he was ostracized by his people, ironically saving
himself when his civilization perished.
The 1966 comic book superhero NoMan "was a human mind housed in a
robotic body. The mind, that of Anthony Dunn, had been transferred into
the robotic form as his human body passed away."
In the 1990 Japanesemanga series Battle Angel Alita,
one of the main plot points orbits around the "secret of Tiphares". In
the aerial city of Tiphares everyone who turns 19 undergoes an
"initiation" to obtain Tipharean citizenship: officially this implies
just gaining a small tattoo on the forehead but secretly the Medical
Investigation Bureau, which controls the city, has the brain of every
initiated person to be mechanically surgically removed and, while their body remained in a temporary suspended animation
until the end of the process, transfers the individual's mind along
with all his memories and informations in a so-called "brain bio-chip",
which mimics every aspect of a human brain, which is then implanted
where the brain was.
In Frank Miller's comic RoboCop Versus The Terminator (1992), the human brain of RoboCop is uploaded into Skynet, the malevolent artificial intelligence from the Terminator series. RoboCop's mind waits hidden inside Skynet for many years until he finally gets an opportunity to strike against it.
In Journey Into Mystery (2013) The aliens Beta Ray Bill and Ti Asha Ra as well as his ship Skuttlebutt are all representative uploaded entities. Bill is a cyborg and Ti Asha Ra is created from within the Celestial Galactus
himself. In issues #652-55, Skuttlebutt is destroyed, and Ti Asha Ra is
killed; however, the ship entity Bill had been chasing is a form of
cosmic life collector and partitions Ti Asha Ra's mind to upload
Skuttlebutt's consciousness into her physical body, apparently
resurrecting her from the dead. It also uploads the life goddess Gaea and Ti Asha Ra into itself, which allows the Asgardian warrior maiden Sif and Bill to rescue them later as all is returned to normal.
In Amazing Spider-Man, Otto Octavius was able to house copy of his mind in a robotic body of the Living Brain. After its destruction, Octavius transferred his mind into a clone body and then, into a new clone body of Spider-Man.
In DC comics the hero "NoMan" was a 76-year-old man before having his consciousness uploaded.
In Delphine Software's game Flashback
(1992), the protagonist Conrad Hart discovers that the Morph alien race
is plotting to invade Earth. Knowing that the Morphs will erase his
memory if they discover that he knows about them, he copies his memory
and records a message of himself in his holocube in case if his memory
is erased.
In the Mega Man X
video games (1993–), X's creator Doctor Light had uploaded his
brainwaves into a computer before he died, and effectively "lives beyond
the grave" as a sentient hologram that can communicate with X and Zero.
Additionally, one stage (Cyber Peacock) and the game Mega Man Xtreme involved the protagonists (artificial humans) being uploaded into "cyberspace".
The computer game Independence War (1997), in which the player is assisted by a recreation of CNV-301 Dreadnought's former captain, who is bitter about having been recreated without his consent.
In the computer game Total Annihilation
(1997), a multi-millennia galactic war rages between a society
demanding mandatory destructive uploading and a rebellion against it.
In the Japanese release of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere
(1999), the main antagonist is the result of a mind uploading
experiment, which is referred to in the game as "sublimation" after the phase transition.
In Metroid Fusion (2002), Samus Aran's
commander and friend Adam had his brain uploaded to the Federation's
network, a process that is apparently common for scientists and leaders.
In the MMO Eve Online
(2003), players take the role of pilots for hire known as "capsuleers"
or "Empyreans". Through usage of capsule technology, they have their
minds downloaded and transferred to a new clone through the galactic
network at the moment before death.
In the RPG game Harbinger (2003) one of the playable characters is uploaded being in a gladiator robotic body, on a generational starship.
In the computer game City of Heroes (2004–), the arch-villain known as Nemesis was born in Prussia during the 18th century, but has since then put his mind into a complex, steam-powered robotic body.
In the video game Jak 3 (2004), the character Vin uploads his mind into a computer before he is killed.
In the Destroy All Humans!
series (2005–), Orthopox 13 uploads a "copy of my [his] exquisite mind"
onto a Holopox unit just before his ship is nuked by the KGB.
In the games Portal and Portal 2, the character GLaDOS
is actually Aperture Science's CEO Cave Johnson's assistant Caroline,
transferred into a computer. Cave originally opted for himself to be
transferred into a computer, but died before it could happen, and hence
Caroline was transferred instead. At the end of Portal, GLaDOS also
claims to have Chell's brain "scanned and permanently backed up in case something terrible happens".
In the game Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (2006), the character Professor Hojo is revealed to have uploaded his consciousness into the worldwide network moments before his death in the original Final Fantasy VII
(1997) as a means to survive the encounter with the protagonists and
ultimately download himself into a new, stronger body 3 years later.
In the iPhone RPG Chaos Rings
(2010), a human named Theia transferred her consciousness and memories
into the mainframe of the Ark Arena, a highly advanced spaceship and
time travel machine, in order to oversee its activities.
In Assassin's Creed: Revelations
(2011) it turns out that Subject 16 uploaded his mind into the Animus
virtual machine shortly before committing suicide in the first game.
In the game Deponia (2012) the character "Goal" has her personality backed up onto a disc, inserted inside her head.
Cortana from Halo series is based on a cloned brain.
In Halo 4
(2012), this is the main purpose of the Forerunner device known as the
Composer. It digitizes organic intelligences, allowing them to live as
AIs. However, the process corrupts the minds that are converted and is
irreversible.
In Mass Effect 3 (2012), Legion (member of a race of Synthetic Intelligences known as the Geth) temporarily uploads Commander Shepard's consciousness into the Geth Consensus, the network that houses all Geth programs.
In Crysis 3 (2013) it was revealed that in the time since Crysis 2, the personality of "Alcatraz"—the protagonist of Crysis 2—was effectively supplanted by "Prophets" whose memories and consciousness were embedded in the "nanosuit" that Alcatraz was wearing.
In the MMO first-person shooter Dust 514
(2013), mercenary foot soldiers use a device called a Neural Interface
System (NIS) implant to transfer conscientiousness to a clone body at
the moment of death.
In the thriller game Master Reboot
(2013) the players' character is uploaded into the "Soul Cloud" upon
biological death, where all the data that makes up a persons soul in
stored in vast data banks.
In Warframe
(2013), the titular Warframe suits are actually biomechanical shells
which are connected the conscience of the actual Tenno, human children
who were given unpredictable powers by the Void.
In the video game Elite: Dangerous (2014) from Frontier Developments,
Utopia, one of possible Powerplay factions to be joined by players, was
created over idea of preservation of human mind through mind uploading.
In the JRPG "Xenoblade Chronicles X"
(2015), where humans who escaped the Earth's destruction had their
consciousnesses recorded and stored inside a database where they can
control artificial bodies known as Mimeosomes.
In the Visual NovelSteins;Gate 0
(2015), a main character Makise Kurisu, persists in the form of a
digital copy of her brain powered by the experimental program "Amadeus".
Other media
In the tabletop game Car Wars
(1980) characters' bodies are routinely cloned and their stored
memories uploaded into the new bodies, which are activated upon the
death of the old versions.
In the Rifts role-playing game Dimension Book 2: Phase World (1994), a member of an artificial race called the Machine People named Annie integrates her consciousness permanently with a spacecraft.
In the online collaborative world-building project "Orion's Arm" (2000–) the concepts of mind copying and uploading are used extensively, particularly in the e-novel Betrayals.
The award-winning RPGTranshuman Space (2002) tackles the mind-uploading issue with the concept of xoxing,
which is the illegal perfect copy of a mind. Mind emulation (called
ghosts) is always destructive, so a living person cannot co-exist with
their digital copy. Nevertheless, this doesn't prevent multiple digital
versions from being simultaneously active. Law prohibits more than one
active copy of a brain emulation or a strong artificial intelligence
at a time (security backups being considered inactive), and the RPG
delves into the possible abuses of this (like cult leaders implanting a
copies of their own minds in every cult followers' neural interfaces).
The RPG Eclipse Phase takes place in a frightening future after a technological singularity in which a group of superintelligentSeed AIs known as TITANs that were infected by an alien nano-virus forcibly destructively uploaded most humans and transhumans
alive at the time and kidnapped their egos (term used for brain
emulations in the setting), while destroying the surface in an event
called "The Fall". Most of the survivors live in space, and have
uploaded their personalities (or "egos") and can regularly switch
between physical bodies ("morphs"), or inhabit simulated bodies
("infomorphs") in virtual environments. Duplication of uploaded
personalities is also possible ("forking").
