Christopher Altman | Quantum Technologist, NASA-trained Commercial Astronaut

Starlab, Singularity, and Nuclear Armageddon

EUROPEAN UNION・ANNO DOMINI 2001.

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 19^th 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 world renowned 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. 

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, DF-II continues 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, macroscopic entanglement, 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. The one-of-a-kind machine was recognized by the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records as the “World’s Most Complex Artificial Brain.” In testimony before the French Sénat and a later advisory report as Chair of the First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, I argued: “Future networks will not be built. They will be grown.” 

When the laboratory came up short on research grants in June, I personally went to the President himself when serendipity brought us together at the same time and place on his first trip overseas after election. The Commander in Chief, who had just arrived in Brussels for a meeting with NATO, impressed upon us both his immediate familiarity with the lab and its work, and his enthusiastic approval in response to my earnest request for $1M in budget — funds 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 field, I was honored to be selected by the US Government as one of three graduate students most likely to impact the future of the field at Salishan — a distinction shared with John Carmack and Bill Butera — was 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 senators, senior politicians, and international diplomats at the French Sénat for its historic hearing on artificial intelligence in Paris — the world's first senate hearing on the subject — Starlab's principal investigator and AI program lead, Hugo de Garis, suggested that I might one day even be elected President myself. Far sooner than that, however, he drew our attention to the possibility of violent threats from activists, extremists, or technology Luddites who might rise in opposition to the rapid pace of progress in science and artificial intelligence. In our time working together at the lab, de Garis refused to open packages or accept postal deliveries, fearing he may be targeted by the likes of the Unabomber or a would-be copycat. 

Our living arrangements at the lab consisted of an expansive three-bedroom master suite with fully-stocked library, typically reserved for visiting prime ministers, senators, and senior diplomats. My quarters were shared with none other than the project’s principal scientific investigator himself. One midsummer’s afternoon as the two of us strolled on a random walk through the sprawling estate and lush wooded grounds surrounding the manor, immersed in a passionate debate on the long-term promise and perils of superintelligence, the ever-eccentric de Garis came up with a radical idea: to obtain a life-size replica of Fat Man — the solid plutonium core, 21 kiloton, 10,300-pound nuclear bomb detonated over Nagasaki in World War II — and to mount it precariously to the vaulted ceilings of my apartment, with the bomb hanging directly over my bed.  

The Volkswagen beetle-sized replica of the bomb was constructed for a Discovery Channel documentary de Garis had just finished filming on the future of artificial intelligence, which featured a potential global war between humanity and artificial intelligence. He'd purchased it outright from the director, making arrangements for expedited shipping and delivery direct to Starlab's headquarters in Brussels. The sheer audacity of the proposal was outrageous. He intended the bomb to serve as a dramatic and powerful reminder of “the weight of my responsibility to the future of humanity.” He certainly knew how to drive home a point.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI founder Elon Musk,  DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have each warned that advanced AI could pose an extinction-level risk comparable to nuclear war. 

That question has shaped my work for decades. To address the risk directly, I developed and patented a framework — the Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol — that detects whether an AI system treats self-continuation as a terminal goal rather than an instrumental one. The method doesn't rely on behavioral observation, which can be gamed. It operates on latent structure: agents with terminal continuation objectives produce measurably higher von Neumann entanglement entropy in their trajectory geometry than agents that treat continuation as a means to other ends. That entropy differential is the signal. The Continuation Observatory runs this measurement against frontier models globally, detecting emergent continuation signatures in real time.

 

With the explosive rise of AI we've seen over the last twenty-four months alone, 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 unprecedented approach — was just a few years ahead of his time. 

A recent Financial Times (FT) spinoff magazine article in Sifted highlights our research going back to Starlab, AI and time travel research projects, and my subsequent travels across East Asia to create national quantum roadmaps for US national research funding and IC agency directors.  In years that followed, I continued on through research fellowships in nanoscience and the foundations of quantum mechanics with Nobel physics laureate Anton Zeilinger’s research group in Austria and across Europe, then was recruited to help create a futures initiative at NASA in collaboration with Google and Ray Kurzweil, together with leading companies, luminary scientists, astronauts, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and around the world. 

From manned spaceflight training at NASA on to the summit of a volcano where the Apollo 11 astronauts trained before their first landing to put a man on the Moon, to the development and deployment of a fundamentally new quantum communication system based on continuous-variable quantum teleportation to provide space-based NASA assets with unconditional information security — from collaborations leading diplomats to advise the United Nations on critical security issues of the future — to field expeditions employing state-of-the-art sensors in rough desert terrain with a multidisciplinary team of scientists, special forces operators, and agency directors beta-testing next-generation technologies in austere environments, each of these initiatives was undertaken with the singular aim to make a profound and positive impact on the future of humanity, for our children, our children’s children, and the generations yet to come.