Question: What scientific breakthrough are you most keen to see?

Jake Langham answered on 15 Nov 2017:

This has really got me thinking! Since I’m allowed to wish for anything, I guess it had better be pretty big (and it doesn’t even matter if it’s impossible!) Deep down I think it would have to be making contact with an advanced alien race. If we could communicate properly, the opportunities for learning and discovery would be huge. Imagine an intra-galactic internet that connected different civilizations, what would that be like I wonder?

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Please read to the end of this, trust me it’s worth it!

Couldn’t resist a second choice, so I pick: ‘mind-uploading’. This will really get you thinking. Some scientists think that in the future it will be possible to simulate a brain on a computer. A brain is made up of loads of cells called neurons that all communicate with each other using electricity. We understand how they behave quite well. One thing we can do is make very detailed scans of the brain. Eventually these might be good enough that we can make a ‘map’ of all of a person’s neurons and how they connect up. Then we would give that map to a computer and it could simulate what the neurons do very accurately. Maybe it could do it so well that the brain in the computer does exactly what the brain in real life does! So here’s some questions for you. If you died, but your brain was uploaded to a computer just beforehand and it carried on simulating like you hadn’t died, would you still experience things? And would you be alive still, even though it’s just a computer simulation? Would it be okay to turn the simulation off? What if the simulated brain was connected to a robot body that could behave just like a human body?

I’d love to hear your ideas, if you read that far haha 😀