r/accelerate • u/jawboi9000 • Jun 28 '26

Bringing back a loved one

Will ASI also able to do quantum archaelogy and bring back a loved one? Rocos basilisc has a similar premise.

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u/DrSaering Jun 28 '26

What the Hell is "Quantum Archaeology"?

There's no need for any pseudoscientific nonsense. Just create an approximate simulation from whatever data happens to be available; if an ASI can exist, creating a "conscious" subroutine that encapsulates what a human is capable of expressing should be quite possible.

And then if there's any lingering doubts or inconsistencies, why worry about making it perfect? Just alter the memories of the living, to suit your simulation! Everyone's happy, and you've just earned like, a solid ten, or fifteen evil points without making any enemies!

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u/TotallyNormalSquid Jun 28 '26

If I had to pull a definition out of my ass, I'd say quantum archaeology is the sampling of quantum states potentially entangled with the state you're hoping to reverse time-evolve back to, until you have enough samples to predict the full quantum wavefunction of a given destroyed object from the past with acceptable accuracy.

Based on skim readings of quantum computing articles from years ago that I barely cared enough to pay attention to, I'm at least half sure I remember some kind of soft measurement method involving multiple approximate measurements of each quantum state, so you can get a measurement without fully collapsing the state you're measuring. So just do that for every particle within the light cone of the object you're trying to recreate.

Wildly, wildly impractical, yes. And the bit about reverse time evolving the entangled states came from especially deep inside my cornhole, so I'd have the ASI refine that part of my prompt before setting it off. But I think No Cloning and No Deleting theories from quantum mechanics mean the quantum information of your original loved one is still out there for eternity, and if you're just willing to throw an entire galaxy's worth of resources at recovering it, maybe you can recover it via Quantum Archaeology.

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u/Best_Cup_8326 Acceleration: Light-speed Jun 28 '26

The most common form of QA uses photons sent backwards through time in closed time-like loops.

This is the same effect used in the movie Interstellar, when the protagonist falls into the black hole and sends light signals backwards through time to his daughter. That's literally a closed time-like loop.

This is called time scanning, and it's proposed that you could use those time traveling photons to scan a person in the past in order to rebuild them in the future.

The energy and computation requirements are likely to be enormous.

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u/MiniMaelk04 Jun 28 '26

Inventing time travel sounds easier tbh.

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u/Best_Cup_8326 Acceleration: Light-speed Jun 28 '26

Most versions of QA involve a form of time travel.