Quantum technologist, NASA-trained Commercial Astronaut Christopher Altman

Starlab, the Singularity, and Nuclear Armageddon

I began my scientific career at a multidisciplinary research institute, Starlab, located deep in the serene and secluded forests outside Brussels, Belgium. The lab’s principal base of operations was housed in a historic landmark — an imposing 19th century manor, remarkable both in scale and magnificence. In a previous incarnation, the palatial grounds served as official embassy for the First Republic of Czechoslovakia. Its nearest neighbor, the legendary Pastéur Institute, was one of but a handful of highly-secured Biosafety Level 4 labs in the world. 

Cofounded by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and serial entrepreneur Walter de Brouwer and established in partnership with MIT, Oxford and Ghent University, Starlab was created as a “Noah's Ark” to bring together the world's most brilliant and creative scientists to work on far-ranging multidisciplinary projects that hold the potential to convey a profound and positive impact on future generations. 

Starlab was borne as an incubator for long-term and basic research in the spirit of Bell Labs, MIT Media Lab, Xerox PARC, and Interval Research. Its research mantras were “Deep Future” and “A place where one hundred years means nothing.” Approximately 130 scientists from thirty-seven different nationalities — each established leaders in their respective research fields — lived and worked at the lab. 

DF2 (Deep Future II) Barcelona

A second base of operations, Starlab DF-II (Deep Future II) was established in the Royal Observatory in Spain on a mountaintop perch overlooking the city of Barcelona. With a more tightly-focused mission scope of space-borne and neuroscience research, Starlab DF-II has continued to innovate and grow to present day. 

Discovery Channel Special

Onsite research ranged from artificial intelligence, biophysics, consciousness, emotics, intelligent clothing, materials science, protein folding, neuroscience, new media, nanoelectronics, quantum computation, quantum information, robotics, stem cell research, theoretical physics — e.g., the possibility of time travel — transarchitecture, and wearable computing. 

Our custom-built supercomputer, the CAM-Brain Machine, was supported in part by a 1 Million Euro grant from the European Union. The custom-designed and created supercomputer — as powerful as 10,000 Pentium II PCs — harnessed the power of Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA) evolutionary hardware to evolve seventy-five million neurons in a massively-parallel artificial neural network instantiated directly in silico using evolutionary genetic algorithms. With each clock tick, the supercomputer simultaneously updates hundreds of  millions of cellular automata billions of times per second. 

When our laboratory came up short on research grants, I personally went to the President himself when fate brought us together at the same time and place on his first trip overseas after election. The Commander in Chief impressed me with both his immediate familiarity with our work and and his enthusiasm in response to my earnest request for $1M in budget that had been allocated for national security priority scientific research topics through a grant newly created by Clinton with his last act in office, the 2001 National Nanotechnology Initiative.         

For my contributions to the program, I was selected by the US Government as one of three graduate students most likely to impact the future of the field at Salishan, an honor shared with John Carmack and Bill Butera, sponsored to attend conferences and senior administrator briefings at Fort Meade, National Security Agency headquarters outside Washington, DC, attended the World Technology Summit in London, was an invited delegate to the French Sénat to provide testimony on the future of technology and how it will transform our lives over coming decades — and more. 

Following three days of enraptured debate with senior politicians, senators and international diplomats at the French Sénat hearing on artificial intelligence in Paris, the world's first senate hearing on the topic, Starlab's principal investigator and AI program lead predicted I'd one day be elected President myself. Far sooner than that, however, he drew my attention to the threat of assassination from technology Luddites who stand in opposition to the rapid pace of progress in artificial intelligence.

My living arrangements at the lab consisted of an expansive three-bedroom master suite and fully-stocked library, typically reserved for visiting prime ministers and senior diplomats, and was shared with none other than the project's principal investigator, Hugo de Garis. de Garis came up with the idea to obtain a life-size replica of Fat Man — the solid plutonium core, 21 kiloton, 10,300-pound nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki — and to mount it precariously to the vaulted ceilings of my apartment, with the bomb hanging directly over my bed. 

The sheer audacity of the proposal conveyed an unforgettable impression that seemed more than a little bit crazy at the time. Intending to serve as a dramatic and powerful reminder of “the weight of my responsibility to the future of humanity,” he planned to make the message one to remember. de Garis had just finished filming a Discovery Channel documentary on the Future of Artificial Intelligence that featured the potential for future conflict between humanity and artificial intelligence. The Volkswagen beetle-sized replica of the bomb served as a prop for the documentary that he purchased outright from the film studio, making arrangements for expedited shipping and delivery direct to Starlab's headquarters in Brussels.

With the contemporary advent of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) we see all around us today—and with artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) seemingly just around the corner — one could say that de Garis, though radical and exceedingly unconventional in his approach, was just a few decades ahead of his time. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI founder Elon Musk, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have each claimed that AI poses an extinction risk on par with nuclear war. The work and life experiences and the lessons learned from living at Starlab in such a unique and remarkable environment are priceless, growing ever more timely and relevant with each passing day. 

A recent Financial Times (FT) spinoff magazine, Sifted article highlights my background going back to Starlab, AI and time travel research, travels across East Asia to create national quantum roadmaps for US national research funding and IC agency directors — on through foundational research fellowships in quantum mechanics with Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger’s group in Austria and across Europe — from manned spaceflight training at NASA on to field expeditions employing state-of-the-art sensors, leading multidisciplinary teams of scientists, researchers, special forces domain experts and engineers to field-test next-generation technologies in austere environments  — all under the shared overarching objective of contributing to large-scale global initiatives that hold the potential to convey a profound and positive impact on the future of humanity — our children, our children’s children, and the generations yet to come. 

⦿ Starlab: The Noah's Ark of Scientific Research that Launched 1000 Startup Ideas

“ Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light — not our darkness — that most frightens us. We oft ask ourselves: ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are we not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small here doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that lies within us. It’s not just in some of us. It’s in everyone—and as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. ”

— Marianne Williamson