EVE Fiction

I've reread your comment, and you're right. I'm getting now what you wanted to say, sorry for the confusion.

no need to apologize.

If I remember the most recent of those discussions, the word from the devs was somewhat noncommittal as far as soft cloning goes. They didn't say anything to encourage thinking it was possible, but I don't remember the idea being shot down outright.

I think the justification many use is things like the Broker maintaining multiple copies of himself, and the idea if the Broker can make multiple copies of himself, why can't we keep a backup?
It should also be noted one of the important things to understand is that, at some point, capsuleers are just data traveling from one body to another, and data can be copied (though many who hold the idea of soft clones rather than saying we are backed up when we pod or jump clone, rather take advantage of some unspecified scanning method that takes longer but doesn't liquefy grey matter).

Also note that while the pod and cloning are a match made in heaven, neither is required for the other. Pods existed before cloning, and cloning has been used without a pod. I seem to remember reading a chronicle where an executive uses a jump clone, and ignoring that I do think it has been mentioned that the technology was used before it was mated to pods. Even without soft clones, getting fatally injured outside a pod doesn't mean permanent death. The reason a pod is so great is it's a controlled environment and the head and brainscanner are close together and don't move too much. You could certainly put scanners and a CRU in hospitals to use on critically injured patients.

Read the Book "Templar: One"

In the fact the first Merc Implants was from Sleeper, and the Amarr used these Implants for R&D for the Templar Army.
So I don't want to spoiler much more.
The technology of the instant transfer from the mind to the Body is all ready there.
Also for People they are not in the Pod...

Don't forget at the last Fanfest, the devs heavily hinted at the Guristas developing a way to make a mind transfer from a Capsuleer to a Dust Merc or Valkyrie pirate. That tech suggests an effort to make a more universal implant and consciousness transfer system.

I'd guess it'd also be possible to store neural patterns as computer data, thus making it so that an individual that was 'out of clones' could be saved in a computer bank. Which is why we have bits of lore about infomorphs.

What you are talking about is, in classical sci-fi terms, often regarded as post-"technological singularity" tech. This has tons of humongously important implications. Although it is probably not impossible to have something artificial that is functionally comparable to a human mind, it would definitely not operate on the same principles, since its thought-equivalents would not emerge from an actual organic brain made of interconnected neurons. Essentially, this would make capsuleers be a lot more similar to rogue drones sentient software than to anything else. It would not fit the eve universe at all.

For cloning to even make sense, the brain image we are talking about can only be a mapping of the architectural configuration of an actual biological brain; a 3D image with a ridiculously high definition that records exactly what is where in your brain at a neurological, or maybe even molecular level.

It is not even software, it is a blueprint.

This is the main reason why, even with the technology to store complex brain mappings in a database (which is not all that complicated, given a large enough database), those brain mappings cannot be functional consciousness on their own. That's why it needs to be made into an actual organic brain for your mind to exist again. It is the electro-chemical activity in a biological brain that makes it work the way it does.

Otherwise, why even keep a pre-made clone? Capsuleers in a post-singularity sci-fi universe would quickly realize that it is extremely more practical to exist as software most of the time and to only build a cloned biological body when they actually need one. You wouldn't need your biological body when you are plugged in your ship, so this would defeat the whole purpose of capsule tech. Your character would then be a form of software-being that uploads itself into a ship and that can simply upload itself somewhere else if said ship is destroyed or not needed. Clones would only be occasionally kept as blank bodies to upload yourself into whenever you want to stop being a sentient ship and would rather become human again.

If what you are saying is, in fact, possible in the EVE universe, then practically all forms of cloning are already obsolete because of the same technology that made consciousness-transfer cloning possible.


Edit: On a side note, I really hope that what I described here is not what happened with the sleepers.

The problem with that is that standard cloning works by taking a snapshot of neural activity.
Even if brain death hasn't occurred yet, the death of the body is going to throw that activity off, so copying that is only going to cause problems. It's even mentioned in the lore about cloning that taking the snapshot too late is bad for this reason.

Just going to drag back these comments for a moment to be clear on something: While we've never had a dev outright say "Yes this is absolutely possible", there have have been numerous implicit confirmations. The example that comes to mind was when a dev-actor character was walking into a potentially dangerous situation (out of the pod) and was outright asked what would happen if he was attacked, he said "uh, I'll just clone?"

That is, in my opinion, pretty clear confirmation that it is possible to somehow produce a 'backup' which can be held in storage until needed.

I looked up previous questions like this and did find some people mentioning soft-scans. That would have to be the way that jump clones work, but does it require a machine like an EEG, and a certain amount of time?