Meditating on Quantum Archeology

Resurrect your dead self in your mind and enjoy the ride.

The great thing about writing fiction is that you get to live in a world of your own creation. You make all the rules, play God, etc. It truly is an underrated pleasure.

I’m currently writing a screenplay that takes place in the distant future. A central part of the story involves resurrecting the lead character’s dead wife. Since it’s science fiction, this is easily within the realm of possibility. And as the author, I have no trouble putting myself in the mind of the resurrected woman.

The term “quantum archeology” has been coined to describe the process of using technology to resurrect the dead. I’ve been aware of this concept for a while through my interests in the transhumanist movement. I’ve written about it, podcasted about it, and even interviewed Zoltan Istvan about it. But I’ve got to tell you, there’s something unique and powerful about writing a fictional story where a character experiences it.

A lot of my idea generation for fiction happens either in the shower or lying in bed at night. So lately, whether it’s in the shower or in bed, I often find myself pulled into the mind of this made-up woman. The reality she finds herself in is entirely different from the one she previously inhabited. She has a lot of her old memories. But they no longer make much sense. She feels utterly out of place. She has this sense of wanting to go home. Wanting to see something familiar. But then there’s something else she feels. A sense of connectedness to a sort of universal consciousness. To having a spark of life innate to her being. To having the universe at her fingertips, for an incalculable amount of time. Perhaps for eternity.

It's really me feeling all this, of course. Drifting off to sleep. Finding myself in a new world, in a free-floating space pod colony, the sort that Jeff Bezos imagines. Earth is a far-off memory for everyone living, not just for me. This new world is one of instant delights and possibilities. It’s just the … the uncanny suddenness of waking up from the dead to find myself here. The absurdity of it. And that feeling I can’t shake. That parts of myself are missing, and that my consciousness has been disconnected somehow from my sense of identity.

It's hard to describe any of this. Meditating on quantum archeology is mostly a visual, impressionistic experience. But it’s a trip. Frankly it’s a more interesting experience than meditating on, say, your breath, your reflections of the day, or any of the other common things people meditate on.

If there’s anything I’ve taken away from this meditation, it’s that I’m now totally comfortable with the idea of being resurrected through technology. Death—ultimate death—is just so painfully boring in comparison. But getting your consciousness re-sewn into existence through technology? Even if it’s messy or flawed in some way, it’s anything but boring.

Before you start your own practice of meditating on quantum archeology (because why wouldn’t you?!), it’s helpful to first grasp some of the mechanics for how it works.

In a recent article “How to Bring Back the Dead,” Zoltan Istvan explains: “Quantum Archaeology has two components: the ability to reverse engineer matter and the ability to 3D bioprint that matter.” Bioprinting would be the easy part. According to Istvan, “Based on the trajectory of how fast 3D bioprinting is improving—a tiny human heart was printed out in 2019 by scientists in Israel—it’s hard to imagine by the year 2100 we wouldn’t be able to print out full living human beings successfully.”

The other part, reverse engineering matter, is much less of a certainty. “It relies on the universe being deterministic, which some modern physics like quantum theory has shown unlikely.” However, Istvan goes on to say, “Putting the determinism debate aside, let’s assume for a moment that humans can at least reverse engineer the past because it has definitely occurred in a specific way. This would be done by massive supercomputers untangling the subatomic occurrences of certain geographical places in the universe—in our case, planet Earth and its surroundings. It sounds insanely large and complex to do this, but already in 2018, America’s largest supercomputer was able to do 200,000 trillion calculations per second. Quantum Archaeology supporters argue that if the microprocessor can improve for another 100 years following Moore’s Law, then the number of calculations a supercomputer can do could become greater than the number of atoms that compose them.”

There’s a lot there. Time to take a shower.