I would have said the same if I discovered those scrolls charred to a crisp too, but here we are reading them like it wasn't sci-fi.
So, can we start an X Prize to read the contents of this brain?
So, can we start an X Prize to read the contents of this brain?
By some estimates, the cerebral cortex can store hundreds of terabytes of information. Recovering even 0.1% of that would amount to possibly hundreds of GB of information about life in a major Roman urban center.
If you pass out under water because you run out of oxygen you will immediately resume breathing and drown.
They revive a knight who attacks them and gets killed, a hippie who they kill off after questioning, and finally a future human with psychic powers who steals the revival device.
By no means perfect but it's surprisingly close. Granted I think that interpretation is from looking at stuff like electrical activation and not just brain structure itself and the fossil is the latter.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/5/4/23708162/neurote...
But bring to machine interfaces are an entirely different thing altogether and they test it with controls and training unknown examples and then proceeding to prediction based off of training.
Plus - information storage in the brain is both distributed, and micro-scale.
At some point, you are trying to recover compressed data from a HD where only one or two bits can be still read from each 512-byte sector - basic information theory says that the only good-enough tech to do the job would be a time machine.
Take sound waves. When they come into contact with matter, most of the waves energy turns into heat, yes? But might a mechanical imprint be made onto a surface? For example tree sap that hadn't yet completely solidified. Could we resurrect the roar of a dinosaur?
This research project therefore entails spreading some gooey substance on the trees in a forest, playing some known voice recording or songs, letting the gooey substance harden, and then training the AI model to look for that signal.
You know someone's gonna do this someday.
I think it's a fascinating idea and something like that instinct has a "there" there. I suspect that, as another commenter is noting, you probably lose too much information in most cases, but it's intriguing enough to merit consideration.
I think I'm sympathetic because I have a version of that too - I'm curious about the idea that the earth's light, sent out into space, may in some instances be recoverable due to spacetime curvature sending old light back to us. Imagine seeing a stream of light livestreaming what the earth looked like millions of years ago! But my understanding is that light spreads out more and more the further it goes so it's not likely to hold together as a decipherable image, but I still wonder about a middle ground of what might be partially recoverable.
4 years of Latin in school finally came in useful!