evilauthor wrote:isaac_newton wrote:Hmmm - dont think that would be a runner [apart from being a poor story
]. Dont forget that the re-programming was done in the fleet over years while the journey was on-going and the terraforming proceeding. Problems:
1) population much much larger now that at Creation. Population not nicely enclosed in cryo-tubes
2) physical resources much less - most of the fleet is defunct, no-more
3) skill resources much less - Bedard and [I guess many of her henchman] went up in the pocket nuke explosian. We know the remaining Angels had some skill in this line, but were not top notch
4) Said reprogramming requires the subject have a neural interface installed in their head (I forget what they were called), something the Federation installed in all their citizens in childhood but that NO ONE alive on Safehold has now, not even any of the Inner Circle. It's actually implied to not be possible to install in adult humans, at least not with stock Fed Tech.
Actually, it's not implied at all. The idea was rejected because implants and high-speed interfaces for NEAT access (which are implied to be wired for bandwidth purposes) would involve physical artifacts any Pasqualite healer would notice. Even if there's an artificial skin flap over a tiny interface port, for instance. Given how much of a high-wear environment Safehold is, Merlin rejected the option even if discovery wasn't a likely scenario. I'd have to dig up the reference, but that's really the only explanation given.
If you consider what happened with Nahrmahn as he was dying, the textev strongly suggests that actually implanting an adult is doable. He didn't have an implant, so the recording device was unable to access stored engrams (memory traces) and what you'd call his personality. Merlin and Owl directed Nahrmahn's nanites to scavenge his body for the necessary materials to build an implant to facilitate the recording while his body was fighting off the effects of massive trauma. That scavenging caused other problems, precisely because they were disassembling organic matter from and using it to quickly build an implant to effectively bridge the biological and digital.
You also wouldn't wing it in a situation like that. The Federation had a basic implant design, which was then hooked up to internal processors and whatever else was necessary. You might skip the bells and whistles, but you'd still use the standard wiring mesh (or whatever it is) that the recording interface would use to access the brain.
Based on current progress in memory research as well as brain-computer interfaces, we can reasonably speculate that any BCI trying to achieve this would have to have the ability to both access (re: read) and stimulate (re: write) neurons and synaptic connections in order to record engrams and map out how their connections when activated since memories aren't stored in distinct and separate units. And that's basically what an implant would be.
The fact that Merlin and Owl were able to record Nahrmahn's personality, despite the problems due to circumstances and how they built an interface, strongly suggests that there's no reason the Inner Circle couldn't implant an another adult. There might be advantages with childhood implantation, but that's not the same as saying that only children can be implanted. Based on our current understandings of neuroplasticity, there's no neurological basis to suggest that an adult'd brain wouldn't similarly adapt to the introduction of new connections to an implant. The brain adapts and reorganizes itself based on stimulus, far more than we previously believed.
And any implant would be designed to work with the brain's existing structures (and it'd have to access pretty much all of them), rather than just being something "new" that's plugged into it with the brain left to figure it out on its own.
You'd implant children because you could, and because there'd likely be a series of neurological benefits early-on as a result. Plus, it'd completely revolutionize childhood education with immense social benefits. And it'd give you a complete personality recording as the child's personality develops, which would be immensely satisfying should there ever be major brain damage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuronal_ ... allocationhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticityhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... -synapses/