Turn your brain into plastic so it can be uploaded into the cloud

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It seems that scientists at MIT may have just made a breakthrough that could eventually lead to immortality. Or so they want you to think. They definitely do not want you to think that it’s a pathway to The Matrix or any other post-apocalyptic future.

What they do is remove the moisture from your brain and replace it with some sort of liquid plastic. This preserves the microscopic structures in the brain itself much better than the way we do it now, which I am pretty sure involves the same sort of meat slicer you find at a sandwich shop. These scientists say this is only so the brain can be studied, but they’re not exactly ruling out the idea of uploading the brain’s contents into the cloud.

Because that always goes so well in movies.

The one thing that they seem eerily anxious to tell you is that this only works on dead brains, it’s a one-way trip. You couldn’t do this to a living brain and then make that brain continue to live again. I have to say, I’m not incredibly comfortable with the fact that they already feel like they have to make this sort of disclaimer. But, they optimistically point out, this technique could be used to preserve a brain for a time in the future where that might not be a limitation.

Once again, I find myself saying, has no one there seen any science fiction movie ever? It’s not bad enough that we’re already involved in building the robot that will probably conquer us, but now apparently we have to preserve brains so they can be used to fight back later when the robots do take over. (As if they wouldn’t destroy those brains, because robots are pretty smart in that way.)

The one thing I have to ask myself is, why am I writing this article on a Fun Friday? I mean, if I’m wrong and this is all harmless then the article will prove I’m wrong. If I’m right, the robots will surely use it against me. Oh well, what can you do.

Source: Gizmodo

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.