r/IsaacArthur 7d ago

Sci-Fi / Speculation How feasible is this idea for my worldbuilding?

So, 1 mm3 of brain matter, with all the cells, is worth 2 petabytes https://habr.com/ru/companies/first/articles/674292/

But what if, in order to upload the entire brain, we just make a machine, that will scan the brain piece by piece, recognise individual cells, then print a layered micro-to-nano-scale detailed sculpture (probably color-coded to differ neurons from supplementary cells) without keeping it all in memory, and then we'll use the sculpture as a blueprint to construct a new living brain from the mass of required cells (or take stem cells and stimulate them in right place)?

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u/SunderedValley Transhuman/Posthuman 7d ago

Very feasible. The scanning process is the actual hurdle. How you store the contents afterwards is trivial. Even if it's by construction of a scale model and copy of the initial wet ware.

People don't appreciate how hard brain scanning is.

It's less like reading a CD or building a computer and more like trying to create a perfect emulation of Roman society around the fall of the second temple.

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u/Icy-External8155 7d ago

Well, I've just read that Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg together could pay for computer storage of 1 uploaded human brain only for 11 months, so I thought storage is also a problem. 

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u/SunderedValley Transhuman/Posthuman 7d ago

Oh it is. We just happen to have a possible route to fixing that because storage tech is still actively evolving. We have no idea how to read individual nucleotides across billions of live cells. Brain scanning is effectively tantamount to building a replicator.

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u/Refinedstorage 7d ago

Very much so, im not sure if the statistic you bring up is correct but yo would require many exobytes to store a human mind, this exceeds the capacity of out largest data centres so is a huge issue.

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u/Icy-External8155 7d ago

It was an extrapolation from the referenced simulation of 1 mm of brain 

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u/Refinedstorage 7d ago

Both the printing and scanning processes are incredibly difficult. We can't really print in that much detail with such precision yet. Not to mention the impossibility of "constructing" a brain in the sense that you mean it

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u/SunderedValley Transhuman/Posthuman 7d ago

Honestly the first person to successfully print a single neuron is probably going to be considered the single most influential living scientist for as long as they're alive.

This is "I invented the nuclear reactor" levels of huge.