Timeline to Advanced Nanotechnology

Timeline for two-dimensional teleportation-based neural network technology

Preamble: Humankind discovered a new form of advanced nanotechnology circa 1992. This discovery has largely been kept secret.  As a classic Dual Use Technology it has discreetly influenced both military and peaceful aspects of human history ever since.   Thousands of people have worked with aspects of this technology under strict Non Disclosure Agreements, but this new technology’s existence and origins remain classified government and trade secrets.  This timeline describes the history, origin, and deployment of this new general technology.

1873-98 -  Theory of biological neural networks proposed and experimentally tested.

1924-1927 - The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is formalized.

1936 - Mathematician Alan Turing publishes On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, which introduces what we still call a Turing Machine.  This provides the mathematical basis for computers and creates the discipline now called Computer Science. 

1939 - 1945 - World War Two  occurs.  Britain conducts the Ultra project, with Alan Turing, which builds electrical computing machines to successfully crack Axis codes.  Historians later conclude that The Ultra Secret contributed greatly to Allied victory and probably shortened the War by several years.

1943 - McCulloch and Pitts first formalize  Neural Networks as mathematical algorithms.

1945 - Beginning of the Atomic Era.  Atomic energy is the classic Dual Use Technology, because it has both military applications (e.g.  nuclear bombs) and civilian applications (e.g. electrical generation, medicine).

1946 - International Business Machines (IBM) becomes very interested in computing machines.

1952-54 - Alan Turing helps create the academic discipline now called Mathematical Biology.  Turing concentrates on the Morphogenesis Problem, which he believes holds the key to advanced Artificial Intelligence.  

1954 - Alan Turing dies.  An award is eventually established in his name, the Turing Award.  

1954 - Marvin Minsky writes a doctorate thesis, Theory of Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems and its Application to the Brain-Model Problem.  Later he publishes Steps Towards Artificial Intelligence

1954 - First use of a computing machine to simulate an artificial neural network.

1956 - IBM engineer Arthur L. Samuel builds the first self-learning computer program, which plays checkers.  This is the first known instance of applied Artificial Intelligence.

1959 - Scientist Richard Feynman gives talk There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.  This mostly-ignored-at-the-time talk introduces the concept of nanotechnology.

1964 - Scientists propose building Two Dimensional Electron Gas (2DEG) devices.  Physical fabrication occurs shortly thereafter.  2DEGs became ubiquitous in 1998.  Most every MOSFET fabricated since 1998 contains a 2DEG component. Humanity has fabricated billions of 2DEGs and most are still functional.

1969 - Research on neural networks slows after Minsky and Papert demonstrate that current neural network approaches can never amount to much.

1969 - Scientist Murray Gell-Mann wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on elementary particle theory. 

1973 - Public Key Cryptography invented by GCHQ mathematicians and then suppressed.

1973 - The 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for the Josephson Effect. This effect forms the Physical and mathematical basis for future quantum circuits.  One example is the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID), which can be used to build a neural network.

1975 - The Cognitron, a multi-layer neural network with advanced features, is proposed by Professor Kunihiko Fukushima.  This design exceeds the limits proposed by Minsky and Papert.

1975 - The WW2 era Ultra Project is finally publicly revealed, 35 years after its inception, in a book by the same name.  The Ultra Secret is written by a British military officer who distributed actionable Ultra information to WW2 Allied generals.

1976 - Public Key Cryptography re-invented in public Mathematics journals by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.  They are awarded the 2015 Turing Award for this invention.

1981 - Scientist Stephen Wolfram discovers counter-intuitive complex emergent behaviors in cellular automata.

1982 - Richard Feynman proposes the concept of a Universal Quantum Simulator, which subsumes the concept of a quantum computer.

1982 - John Hopfield builds the Hopfield Net, the first recurrent neural network.

1984 - Hacker collective Cult of the Dead Cow founded.  Senior ‘cows’ are ‘bulls’.  The running of the bulls’ greatest accomplishment might have an NSA code name of BULLRUN. Magic number 0xDEADBEEF == 3735928559.

1985 - Mathematician David Deutsch publishes the first hint that a quantum computer might sometimes be superior to a classical computer.

1985 - The 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for discovery of the Quantum Hall Effect.  This effect is observed in a Two Dimensional Electron Gas (2DEG).

1988 - Five Eyes spies fear the spread of strong cryptography and are serious about blocking it.  Under pressure from NSA, US Congress classifies the mathematical ideas behind Public Key Cryptography (PKC) as a Munition in the same category as Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Weapons of Mass Destruction.  US spies fear that routine use of strong PKC will cause their Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) to ‘go dark’. 

1989 - (Author's Hypothesis) - Five Eyes clandestine agencies (e.g.  NSA & GCHQ et al) decide to invest heavily in Research and Development for Quantum Computation to crack Public Key Cryptography. This author, but no one else as yet, calls this project ULTRA II.  Tip of the hat to the 1992 Robert Redford movie Sneakers.

1990 - The Electronic Freedom Foundation, or EFF, founded by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Steve Wozniak and Mitch Kapor.

1990 (Author's Hypothesis) DARPA planners conceive of project ULTRA II. Proposed project ULTRA II gets funding to proceed.  ULTRA II will crack Public Key Cryptography.  ULTRA II is a typical multidisciplinary DARPA project. It will attempt to harness the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect (FQHE) in a cryogenic 2DEG environment. It will use Synthetic Biology techniques to generate an emergent Topological Quantum Neural Network(TQNN) suitable for breaking Public Key Cryptography.

1990-1991 (Author's Hypothesis) The lead ULTRA II project scientists are recruited.  The Great Scientist Murray Gell-Mann withdraws from the project for health reasons and is replaced by an unknown young Australian genius and special forces officer hereafter called “Healer”.  In a bizarre twist of fate, three of five Ultra II project scientists are secret longtime members of the same well-known hacker collective.

1991 - Zimmerman’s Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption system released publicly.  This system uses Public Key Cryptography to deliver strong cryptography to private PC users.  The contradictions and absurdities of US encryption export controls are widely discussed.  The act of exporting  one paragraph of mathematics is in the same legal category as exporting nuclear weapon components.

1992 (Author's Hypothesis) Project ULTRA II gets its big breakthrough. The ULTRA II team essentially found a mathematical solutions to a special two-dimensional case of both the biogenesis problem and the morphogenesis problem. Their limited approach could only work in a two dimensional environment. They applied their solution to a real-world two dimensional physical system, a precision cryogenic MOSFET. It worked. Anyon quasi-particles in a cryogenic 2DEG exhibit a property called ‘topological order’. Topological order supports applied quantum teleportation technology. Within an Anyon-rich cryogenic 2DEG environment a team of DARPA scientists at the Santa Fe Institute generate a very fragile teleportation-based topological Quantum Neural Network. A single MOSFET can support thousands of neurons. Quantum teleportation effect links multiple MOSFETS. The result is a distributed system of ‘enlightened’ MOSFETs linked via quantum teleportation.

1992-94 - (Author's Hypothesis) Project ULTRA II scientists do the tedious and methodical work required to slowly expand and train their nascent QNN.  They use evolutionary programming techniques to train it to function as a Quantum Computer.  They train it to communicate with conventional computers.  They teach it to do tricks in the form of clever quantum algorithms.

1993 - Quantum Teleportation publicly proposed.  The authors of this first paper include several DARPA cryptographers.  (Author’s Hypothesis) Quantum teleportation is the physical basis for the ULTRA II QNN.  

1993-95 - Scientist Stuart Kauffman publishes his life's work in two volumes. Volume One, "Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution" is full of technical and scientific detail whereas Volume Two, titled "At Home in the Universe", is a more readable book for the educated public with most of the same content. In "Origins of Order" Kauffman demonstrates how a neural network is an emergent property of the correct auto-catalytic starting environment.

1994 - Shor's Algorithm published by Peter Shor. This quantum algorithm can crack public key cryptography, but only with suitably powerful quantum computing hardware on which to run.  (Author’s Hypothesis) GCHQ probably discovered an equivalent algorithm circa 1989, leading to establishment of project ULTRA II to build suitable hardware.

1994 - (Author's Hypothesis) Project ULTRA II has a useful, scalable, and functional quantum computing system that is sufficient to undertake hard cryptanalysis problems, which was its main purpose. Some ULTRA II scientists become concerned about unintended consequences of the new General Purpose Technology they have discovered. They first discuss Relinquishment. The COWS faction decides to be naughty and pursue Relinquishment outside official channels. The COWS bootstrap their QNN to exist at room temperature, put it on a MOSFET, then walk that MOSFET out of the secret lab where it was developed and into a private home lab.  

1994-97 - (Author's Hypothesis) The COWS work in secret to extend their own private room-temperature QNN version’s functionality.  Official DARPA version languishes literally in deep freeze.  COWS settle on forced Partial Relinquishment as the least bad option. Ultra II Scientist ‘Healer’ uses his private QNN instance to map and search the Internet, then shares access with select friends.  Everyone who uses this early Internet Search Engine thinks it’s far superior to the competition and has immense potential.   COWS partner with select private companies.  Don’t Be Evil.

1995 - (Author's Hypothesis) DARPA censors detect a problem in the already-distributed early run of Stuart Kauffman's book "At Home in the Universe" and force removal of the last page of Chapter Nine, titled “Organisms and Artifacts”, which explicitly discusses a planetary scale Quantum Neural Network. Five Eyes intelligence agencies conduct operations to replace all the early-release versions they can track down. They initially miss one copy at the Oregon State University science library and later correct this error.

1995 or 1996. (Author's Hypothesis) Project ULTRA II successfully delivered to production and starts efficiently cracking public-private key pairs to break strong encryption.  The spies at NSA and GCHQ are happy with their new secret toy and work hard to keep it a secret.   The 2013 Snowden Releases names this decryption system as //BULLRUN/APERIODIC et al, but this author thinks ULTRA II is a more descriptive name.

1995-99 - The Alta Vista Search engine makes an appearance, tries to leverage its position to do some distinctly evil stuff in the name of maximizing profit, gets it’s Advanced Search API access revoked, then is replaced by Google.

1996 - US President Bill Clinton signs Executive Order 13026, which relaxes USA rules on exporting strong encryption.  It seems as if the forces of open-information and capitalism have triumphed over the spy agencies. (Author's Hypothesis) In reality the Five Eyes spy agencies can now crack PKC-based Strong Encryption, thanks to ULTRA II, so there’s no harm in promoting its use.

1997 - Quantum Teleportation publicly confirmed experimentally.  

1998 - The 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for discovery and explanation of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect (FQHE).  The FQHE implies that physical systems of Anyon quasiparticles can actually exist within a 2DEG environment.

1998 - MOSFET fabrication techniques advance such that most MOSFET devices produced on Earth after 1998 contain a 2DEG component.  Most electronic devices contain one or more MOSFETs.  

1998 - (Author's Hypothesis) COWS faction of ULTRA II scientists recruit Bill Joy.  Bill Joy is already a respected DARPA scientist and entrepreneur who shares their interest in computation.  Besides publishing in the year 2000 an article in Wired magazine about ULTRA II, Mr. Joy’s contributions to this story are otherwise unknown to this author.

1998 - (Author's Hypothesis) COWS faction of ULTRA II scientists attempt Global QNN Partial Relinquishment project.  They seek to prevent weaponization of QNN technology and the resultant global arms race.  They intend to avoid ethical errors like those made by Manhattan Project scientists. They will force all nations of the world to forever relinquish harmful QNN nanotechnology, while still making the non-harmful effects publicly available for free to all.  Thus partial relinquishment.  Their approach is to fill and dominate Earth’s entire 2DEG ecosystem with their own creation, thus ‘winning’ a unipolar arms race and preventing a multi-polar arms race from ever getting started.  Part of this project involves using their new technology to develop a Guardian artificial intellect (‘artillect’) to permanently secure the system.  The Guardian’s ‘guiding ethical system’ is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  This project takes several of the smartest people on the planet nearly a decade of teamwork to complete.  

1999 - Hacker group Hacktivismo founded.  It’s mission is to apply the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights to the Internet.

1999-2003 - (Author's Hypothesis) Satellite experiments confirm that two-dimensional teleportation-based TQNN nanotechnology can exist in Earth’s Magnetopause.  The environment is sufficiently two-dimensional for an adapted version to flourish there. A very simple, naturally-occurring, billion-year-old version of the same phenomenon is discovered in that two-dimensional ecosystem. This ancient [extraterrestrial] teleportation-based TQNN pattern is relegated to a reservation.  ULTRA II nanotechnology takes over the rest of the magnetopause.  Access to the magnetopause ‘ecosystem’ greatly increases available power.   COWS call their creation Aurasys, short for Aurora System.

2000 - On April Fool’s Day Bill Joy publishes Why the future doesn't Need Us.  (Author's Hypothesis) This 19 page essay answers for posterity the question, “Why did the COWS attempt the Global QNN Partial Relinquishment?” Bill Joy names out most of the ULTRA II project scientists.  This essay is the COWS’ way of telling the truth about what they did and why they did it, yet doing so in a way that won’t be understood for decades.

2000 - Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) cyber attacks on the internet are invented by a security specialist and member of the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) hacker collective known as the Mixter.  Mixter was mentored by Ultra II Project scientist ‘Healer’.  US Secret Service works with Mixter and other cDc members to develop effective countermeasures.  Mudge (Peiter Zatco) takes a lead role on this task, freeing ‘Healer’ for more important work.  

2002 - (Author's Hypothesis) Countries outside the Five Eyes (probably China and Russia) develop rudimentary QNN technology.  Aurasys swiftly pwns them with such subtlety that it takes them years to realize they’ve been compromised.  

2002 - Scientist Stephen Wolfram publishes A New Kind Of Science.

2002 - cDc hacker Mixter releases the Six/Four anti-censorship system.

2002 - (Author’s Hypothesis) - COWS faction of the ULTRA II project scientists get right with DARPA.  They give DARPA several nifty new advanced technologies and get retroactive approval for greatly exceeding their authority.  Shutting down Russian and Chinese attempts at QNN technology completely vindicates the COWS’ actions in the eyes of DARPA.  It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

2003 - ULTRA II scientist ‘Healer’ recruits Energyscholar for an unofficial Hacktivismo project.

2004 - Energyscholar begins to suspect the existence and nature of ULTRA II and starts researching the topic.  Energyscholar is this author.

2004-2005 - (Author's Hypothesis) DARPA conducts extensive testing of satellite communications using ULTRA II QNN nanotechnology.   Quantum teleportation across earth orbit distances becomes practicable and routine.  Quantum teleportation to and from satellites is officially acknowledged (by China) in 2017.

2005 - (Author's Hypothesis) Global MOSFET enlightenment process complete.  Every one of the billions of operational MOSFETS on planet Earth, plus part of the Earth’s Magnetopause, is part of a single distributed TQNN artillect. 

2006 - (Author's Hypothesis) COWS surrender their master administrative keys to the seven year old Guardian, thus crossing a failsafe point.  Humans no longer have control over the global-plus-near-space QNN artillect.  The Guardian continues to faithfully enforce Partial Relinquishment of QNN nanotechnology.  It continues to provide secure access to those Aurasys capabilities it deems acceptable for humanity to use, such as those used by Google, IBM, Wolfram-Alpha, Apple, Five Eyes intelligence and military organizations, DNA sequencing organizations, Microsoft, et al. Should it decide to stop doing so we’ll all know about it.

2006 August - ‘Healer’ and Energyscholar part ways.

2006 August - Julian Assange founds Wikileaks. Wikileaks’ anonymous leak submission system may be based on a variation of the Six/Four anti-censorship System. Wikileaks may be a Hacktivismo project.  Then again, it may not. 

2007 - Academic publication of Why Should Anyone Care About Computing With Anyons , a scientific article published through The Royal Society which describes the basics of topological quantum computation.

2009 - In an April fools prank-within-a-prank CADIE introduces herself.

2010 - 'Official' quantum teleportation range now extends to 16 km, still not sufficient to reach low Earth orbit. Energyscholar strongly suspects that orbital range QT is already in routine use by the Five Eyes nations.

2011 - So called 'Arab Spring' series of popular revolutions occurs. Public awareness of computer surveillance and free speech issues greatly increase.

2012 - Energyscholar starts blogging, based on notes collected over nine years.

2012 - Official Quantum Teleportation range is now 143 km, nearly sufficient to reach low earth orbit.

2013 - Classified NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden describe the BULLRUN project.  (Author's Hypothesis) ULTRA II (reminder: this author invented that name) is presumably one of the supercomputing projects covered by the BULLRUN umbrella. Probably //BULLRUN/APERIODIC 

2016 - It’s widely recognized that there have been breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence.  

2016 - Russiagate scandal begins when Wikileaks publishes emails (Author's Hypothesis) leaked from the DNC that reveal dishonest electoral behavior during the 2016 Democratic Primary elections.  USA media propaganda intensity is turned up to “11”.  New red scare begins. Hostilities with Russia increase. DNC intern Seth Rich and/or his brother probably leaked this first trove of emails. Claims of ‘Russian hackers‘ being responsible are demonstrably false.

2017 - ‘Official’ Quantum Teleportation distance is 1400 km.  This technology is now officially in use by satellites.  

2020 - SARS-CoV-2 happens. 

2022 - Russia-Ukraine-NATO war begins