Archangels return - priests/clones w/reprogrammed memory?

So, I was thinking...

In the Langhorne's big mistake thread, RFC says that "the options available to Langhorne and his immediate successors began and proceeded from the technology initially assigned to the colony by those planners."

So, imagine that shortly before the day of return, deep under the temple, a clone (or clones) of the original Langhorne's team is created, from cells frozen all that time ago, and imprinted with saved memories of the original people (Langhorne & Co, one per clone).

Option 2: The system grabs a priest or an acolyte (an AI could do it, through robotic remotes that are there anyway, they maintain the Temple after all), puts him into one of those machines that reprogram memory, and there you have, Langhorne v 2.0, or Schueler or Jwo-Jeng etc etc.
No need for any frozen cells or tissues.

Option 3: a priest is told to give a blood sample, a clone is created, etc etc.

Option 4: priests bring a child for some ritual and.. you can guess the rest.


No need for PICAs, no need for putting original people into cryopods for a thousand years (remember, RFC said that those cryopods weren't really designed to hold people for that long, or ever tested for that long, obviously), and you will have humans and not an AI. A complete copy of Langhorne.

Even if the personality diverges over time from what Langhorne would have been (after all, it might be, and probably will be, a different soul), a refresher course in those neural reprogramming machines once a month should keep him fully Langhornized at all times.

The technology for this already exists, they had it all that time ago, and used it en masse (on all the colonists). They again used it on seijins later (textev - HFQ snippets by RFC). It's reasonable to assume that a couple of those machines are still functional under the temple.

Storing one full copy of someone's memory for all this time is not a problem - after all, all these robots that maintain the temple are running the same code from back then. Nimue/Merlin was stored all this time.


The only unanswered question... they (Langhorne & Co) could have been doing this all this time, so why didn't they?

Hmm.

Textev is that neural reprogrammers depend on the recipient having had an implant installed very early in life.

So the Temple would have had to have preserved the technology for installing implants. Did they have autodocs?

That would neatly solve all the problems with any other way for the archangels to return.

They could then install themselves in multiple bodies at once. There could be ten thousand Langhornes singing "Army of Me".

I know Option 2 is impossible. I think Options 3 and 4 are not possible, based on what we know of Federation technology. I suspect that Option 1 is also not possible.

Memory downloading is only possible with a full brain shunt implant (I forget what it is called in the books). These implants have to be installed in infancy. So that eliminates option 2; it can't be done to a random adult.

I believe that full memory downloading is customized to each person--to their physical body. I don't think you can download the complete memories of Person X into Person Y. I think it is too closely linked to a specific brain architecture. I think you could download some memories, but not enough to generate the personality behind them. If I am correct, that eliminates Options 3 and 4.

For option 1, I assume you grow the clone to adulthood. You could install the mind shunt, of course, at an early age. But the mind would be unformed. Could you install the memories into an unformed mind? Would the brain architecture be close enough? If the downloading is as closely tied to a specific mind as I think, then I suspect you can't. But I'm not sure. It might be that the act of downloading the memories creates the architecture on an unformed mind.

SWM wrote:I believe that full memory downloading is customized to each person--to their physical body. I don't think you can download the complete memories of Person X into Person Y. I think it is too closely linked to a specific brain architecture.

Considering what Bedard did, first to the original colonists, then again to some of them as seijins, I'd say they were certainly willing to try mix-n-match-ing chunks of memories and implanting memories not belonging to a specific person.

As for the need for implants, this is not necessarily 100% true.

According to textev from MTaT, Merlin recorded Nahrmahn's personality and memory by having nanos already in Nahrmahn build sort of a field-expedient implants, for which said nanos had to scavenge materials from Nahrmahn's brain.
This procedure was considered acceptable since Nahrmahn would die anyway.
Such scavenging was also done in TF times, not to create those implants (they were there from implantation after birth) but to repair/bypass damaged areas, and it would have been done for an accident victim, before sending him to a hospital, where a team of doctors would try to heal whatever damage originally caused it, and to repair the damage caused by nanos if possible.
Without a full hospital on TF level, such a person would probably stay paralyzed or with an effect equivalent to brain damage.
For Nahrmahn it resulted in a not-quite-recorded memories but the difference was small enough that Owl managed to more or less put him together.

However, the original leadership crew (Langhorne & Co) did have an equivalent of a hospital at their disposal (the holy sickbay, textev from HFQ snippets).

And if you bring in a healthy person, and have the materials prepared ahead of time (so the nanos don't need to scavenge parts of his brain) then it would be possible to build such neural implants, since you have all the time you need, because you started not with a person who is dying and without almost any equipment (like Merlin with Nahrmahn), but with a healthy one, so you can take your time. ("you" being, for example, an AI directing this process)

Yes, such a person would not have any training on how to use these implants. But, once he gets a download of the memories and personality of one of Langhorne's crew (or any mix-and-matched synthetic person) he would have that knowledge. Instant training in the latest TF tech

Aethor wrote:As for the need for implants, this is not necessarily 100% true.

According to textev from MTaT, Merlin recorded Nahrmahn's personality and memory by having nanos already in Nahrmahn build sort of a field-expedient implants, for which said nanos had to scavenge materials from Nahrmahn's brain.
This procedure was considered acceptable since Nahrmahn would die anyway.
Such scavenging was also done in TF times, not to create those implants (they were there from implantation after birth) but to repair/bypass damaged areas, and it would have been done for an accident victim, before sending him to a hospital, where a team of doctors would try to heal whatever damage originally caused it, and to repair the damage caused by nanos if possible.
Without a full hospital on TF level, such a person would probably stay paralyzed or with an effect equivalent to brain damage.
For Nahrmahn it resulted in a not-quite-recorded memories but the difference was small enough that Owl managed to more or less put him together.

However, the original leadership crew (Langhorne & Co) did have an equivalent of a hospital at their disposal (the holy sickbay, textev from HFQ snippets).

And if you bring in a healthy person, and have the materials prepared ahead of time (so the nanos don't need to scavenge parts of his brain) then it would be possible to build such neural implants, since you have all the time you need, because you started not with a person who is dying and without almost any equipment (like Merlin with Nahrmahn), but with a healthy one, so you can take your time. ("you" being, for example, an AI directing this process)

Yes, such a person would not have any training on how to use these implants. But, once he gets a download of the memories and personality of one of Langhorne's crew (or any mix-and-matched synthetic person) he would have that knowledge. Instant training in the latest TF tech

You misunderstand my statement about the need for implants. Yes, in an emergency situation, you can upload a person's memories into a computer without an implant. But it destroys the brain when you do it! You can't use that to put memories into a brain.

I was saying that you need the brain implant to download memories from a computer back into a brain. So you can't download memories into a native adult Safeholdian because they don't have implants. You have to put the implant into the brain during childhood.

So, imagine that shortly before the day of return, deep under the temple, a clone (or clones) of the original Langhorne's team is created, from cells frozen all that time ago, and imprinted with saved memories of the original people (Langhorne & Co, one per clone).

If the Federation could do that, they would not need operation Ark at al. They could simply evacuate all Solar System population on a hunderds of millions of Von Neumann probes, each carrying the digital copies of all human in Solar System with their DNA samples.

The problem was, that RFC stated, that the Federation couldn'ty do that. They were close, but still a few decades away. They could not replant the memories in cloned bodies; the best that they could do, was the "emancipated PICA's", and they did not understood the long-therm consequences good enough to rely on the all-PICA civilization.

Probably the best that Federation science could do, is something like the "organic PICA". I.e. to clone the body - without the higher brain functions, of course, simply a vegetative clone - surgically install some sort of VR-type implant inside, and load the personality in the implant.

SWM wrote:You misunderstand my statement about the need for implants. Yes, in an emergency situation, you can upload a person's memories into a computer without an implant. But it destroys the brain when you do it! You can't use that to put memories into a brain.

I was saying that you need the brain implant to download memories from a computer back into a brain. So you can't download memories into a native adult Safeholdian because they don't have implants. You have to put the implant into the brain during childhood.

Actually, you cannot upload it without implants, and uploading doesn't destroy the brain.

Textev: MTaT: "The nannies built the receptors we needed,” Nimue said in a flat tone. “And they found the material to build them by scavenging other parts of your brain. They had to do that anyway for me to block the pain, since you didn’t have the receptors someone on Old Terra would’ve had, but it wasn’t easy and they couldn’t do it without inflicting a lot of additional damage. If by some miracle you hadn’t died after all, Nahrmahn, you’d’ve been a complete paralytic afterwards."

So, what damaged Nahrmahn's brain was that the nanites used some parts of it as materials to build receptors. The process of uploading by itself does not damage the brain.
(Otherwise nobody could ever upload his personality to a PICA or VR).

Additionally, Nahrmahn was dying at the time, only nanites kept him alive and they would have stopped functioning soon.

Also, what probably added to the damage was that the process was not really prepared, in many ways. Merlin was not a trained neurosurgeon or even a paramedic. The instrument used for it was just barebones - even a TF paramedic would have a selection of assorted stuff available.
A prepared hospital (the sickbay in the Temple) would have a lot more.

And if it had needed materials, prepared, then it would not need to take some parts of the brain to use as materials. Which means that you could do the same that was done to Nahrmahn, but without causing the brain damage.

Once the implants are built, then you can download.

Also, regarding downloading into the human brain: RFC said in posts on this forum that in the TF times, people used to sync their memories both ways, so that if their PICA spent some time autonomously, the memories from that period would be copied to the organic brain to keep both personalities in sync.

Dilandu wrote:The problem was, that RFC stated, that the Federation couldn'ty do that. They were close, but still a few decades away. They could not replant the memories in cloned bodies; the best that they could do, was the "emancipated PICA's", and they did not understood the long-therm consequences good enough to rely on the all-PICA civilization.

Heh... can anyone think why this would be a bad idea besides me? I mean you have got the Geth and Cybermen for starters... God I am so far into withdrawl I am imagining the Gbaba fighting species from different universes..