Sci-fi Weapons, Vehicles and Equipment

Are there any negative consequences to genetically engineered near-perfect or perfect memory recall in humans?

Quite a few, people with it actualy exist but are very rare.

...

They tend to go insane by there 20s, and have an... extremely high frequency of suicide.

The human brain just wasn't meant to not forget... It is incredibly disruptive to every day life too, because memory isn't really perfectly controllable... and so they just kind of randomly relive days of there life in vivid detail, drowning out what is really happening.

They also tend to not be able to remember any thing that isn't directly related to themselfs... most likely due to the fact the human brain has limited storage capacity.

...

Its one of those things that sounds great, but is actually quite horrifying in reality.

Edited by Imca on Nov 25th 2018 at 11:12:35 AM

I mean you could always just increase the memory capacity of the brain while you're at it

Even then you are still going to run out of space eventuly, that is a lot of information and there is limits to brain capacity.

And it doesn't remove the disruption of trying to drive your space car, when suddenly your 5 years old and reliving a play date like you were there agian.

Immy: You are actually talking about something different.

There is a difference between Eidetic/Photographic Memory and uncontrollable selective but detailed recall. The first one does not actually exist as far as any study or examination done has found. The second is Hyperthymesia, a complex condition that has the problem of uncontrollable recall. They also do not become their 5-year-old self, they just vividly remember select memories from that time frame often odd and trivial details. They also have a lot of trouble memorizing and processing recent facts and difficulties in thinking in the context of the future and present because their recall of the past is constantly misfiring.

Simply having expanded memory capacity and an ability to accurately recall at will would not actually be a problem. The problem for the people with the condition is there is no control and they don't get to remember what they want. Developing a technology that not only expands a persons memory capacity but enables them to process and recall what they want would not be harmful in that regard.

Not to mention a lot of our "memories" are probably false ones where we've filled in a lot of gaps, be it because of lack of recollection, our own biases to make us seem less like the "bad guy", etc.

It's why eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable.

Also why the Mandela effect is literally just misremembering something. Seriously there are people who believe they fell into a alternate reality rather than just admit faulty memory.

Well, in Eclipse Phase you can store memories in two ways.

The more simpler one is like a camcorder you can turn on and off based on what you were paying attention to, the second more advanced one is a camera that is always on and records everything you do.

But both means are more mechanical than biological.

The problem isnt really capacity, so far as anyone has been able to tell, the human long term memory never "runs out", going on to store everything we learn for as along as one is alive. The real problem is that the process we have for "remembering" things really isnt designed to be very accurate. When we remember something, we creatively recreate it based on emotionally meaningful tags that are shared with many other, very similar, pieces of information or experiences. To provide human beings with anything resembling "perfect recall", you basically have to redesing the entire brain, at which point it's probably not accurate to call the result "human" anymore. The same issue arises whenever someone proposes adding additional memory capacity in the form of some sort of external media, like an additional hard drive or something. The brain just doesnt work that way.

Even what you did today has extreme amounts of gaps

Eidetic memory does exist according to science, it's just incredibly rare for anyone to have it. Something on the order of 10% of the adult population has some level of it from mild to perfect. The best levels of eidetic memory are found in less than 1% of the adult population.

Tom: No it really doesn't. The closest anyone gets is a vivid memory lasting for minutes and is common in children but not necessarily a permanent condition. To top it off they have a vivid recall but questionable accuracy. The memory has been described as vivid but not inherently accurate frequently lacking quite a few details. Like everyone else the accuracy of said memory is very subjective and begins to fade over time. No one has ever had the mythical long-term recall. There is no perfect recall short or long-term present in any human Photographic or Eidetic.

The one claimed "tested" example is considered very dubious because the tester married the subject and she was never retested and has consistently refused to be retested. That is they fall into the annals of unethical, questionable, and fraudulent psychology experiments that haunt the decades of the study of psychology and other mental conditions and phenomena.

To date, everyone who has claimed this ability and been tested has been found to NOT possess it. The closest we have come is various Savants and of the ones tested, again, they have been found to have less than perfect recall and just like the rest of us and "fill in the blanks". They may be more accurate overall but it isn't the myth of the perfect long-term eidetic or photographic memory.

Everyday people can train themselves to have improved memory and become mnemonists but that isn't the same thing either.

I know evolution ain't perfect by any means, but sometimes I feel like the human body needs a some type firmware update with all of the flaws it has.

Humans are flawed by amazing. Despite all the pitfalls and setbacks we have being meat sacks we do some pretty damn impressive things. Though fixing some of our squishy flaws might be nice especially as a form of medical treatment.

I would settle for a user's manual.

Don't worry. We're working on it.

"Eidetic memory": Technically Tom is right, although perhaps not in a way that he intended. There is a sensory memory store, that lasts only a fraction of a second, that appears to be pretty detailed and accurate so far as we can test it.

De Marquis: True enough to a point but the amazing ones are the ones are the few individuals who last minutes and supposedly a couple who had hours. Even then their memories while comparatively more accurate and clear is still missing pieces. Human memory is just fickle and unreliable.

Some sort of tech answer could change that. How much well that depends on how fantastic a technology we are talking. We talking "Johnny Mnemonic", "Ghost in the Shell", or at the upper end digitized but accurately simulated human minds like in the "Bobiverse".

Those make for exciting and interesting stories, but I suspect the human mind just isnt built to operate that way.

Probably. The human brain and how it works just seems to keep getting more complex the more we study it. For example, the latest theory to get a lot of attention, again IIRC, is that our brains are some form of quantum computer or are influenced notably by quantum effects. If that turns out to be true it has some potentially interesting implications.

Has anyone here heard of the concept of a gravity laser?

As in a laser that uses gravity manipulation for the lensing?

Some additional details would be helpful. Lasers, by definition, operate in the electromagnetic field; they have nothing to do with gravity, except to the extent that gravity affects the curvature of space and thus how photons move through it.

Strong gravitational fields exhibit a lensing effect by bending the path of light traveling through them. We can use this to observe astronomical objects at much greater distances than we ordinarily could. We've even measured the gravitational lensing effect of the Sun. However, unless you are talking about the intense surface gravity of a degenerate object, like a neutron star or black hole, the effect is only meaningful on astronomical scales.

The Earth's gravity curves light passing through our atmosphere, but by such a small amount that you'd need advanced laboratory equipment to measure it.

To apply enough curvature to make a laser beam change course on a small scale, like a converging beam weapon or something similar, you'd need a field of tens of thousands of G, if not millions. To create such a field would require so much mass-energy that you'd probably blow up the Earth if you tried. So the only way you could manipulate lasers with gravity in science fiction is if you allow artificial gravity tech.

If you have that, then you can basically do magic.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 29th 2018 at 4:16:49 AM

You're right. I see now I should have been more specific.

I was reading up on gravitational waves and happened upon this paper. It describes a method for creating a device that could exploit quantum processes to create high frequency gravitational waves with a range of possible applications, including space propulsion.

Far as I can understand it, it's supposed to work like this. You take a material, a High Temperature Superconductor or HTSC. The atoms that make it up have certain quantum properties such that, instead of the release of electromagnetic radiation when excited, they emit gravitational waves. The device is called a GASER or Gravity Laser. Pretty far-out stuff.

Here is a more readable overview released by the company that's supposedly working on this technology. Given the most recent materials I could find were all at least a decade old, I have to wonder just what happened to all this research. The fact that apparently nothing whatsoever has come of this for more than ten years inclines me to believe this is fake, but the paper has extensive citations and Robert M. L. Baker Jr. is a real aerospace luminary.

Frankly, I have no idea what to make of this.

Edited by Gault on Dec 1st 2018 at 12:09:00 AM

It's an interesting idea, although like you I have no idea about the scientific validity. The idea that there's some magical substance that "emits gravity waves when excited" seems pretty far-fetched. I mean, technically everything emits gravity waves just by moving around, but the strength is so low that it might as well be irrelevant. (The EM field is 10^32 times stronger than gravity.)

To have something emit them at strengths that would compete with electromagnetism (without being as dense as neutron star matter) sounds like pure magic.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 30th 2018 at 11:26:20 AM