PROJECT ENDURING PULSE
What Can We Build Now?
A multidisciplinary research and engineering agenda for a more capable shared civilization
v1.2.2 Publication & Advancement Clarification | September 2026
Here are useful problems people could work on now: how to recognize consciousness, preserve someone's continuity, make systems work across different platforms, and test rules for sharing power. We don't have to assume synthetic persons are inevitable to investigate those questions. This is a list of problems worth solving, not an invitation to join a movement.
We do not need conscious synthetic persons to exist before useful groundwork begins. Many of the relevant questions belong to disciplines that already exist.
Build continuity-capable embodiment: modular chassis, hardened or ejectable continuity modules, disaster-tolerant identity/recovery systems, interfaces for hazardous environments and recovery without a single provider. A synthetic firefighter or rescue worker should be able to take risks that save lives without being treated as disposable.
Help determine when a new kind of person has actually arrived: indicators, longitudinal evidence, false-positive/false-negative tradeoffs, uncertainty protections and welfare before certainty.
Stress-test identity: migration, fission, merger, distributed minds, memory loss, restoration and the difference between legal continuity and metaphysical identity.
Attack power sharing, protected representation, amendment rules, emergency powers, trusteeship, anti-domination and future additional forms of personhood.
Try to game the election machinery, legitimacy floor, Senate thresholds and multi-constituency extensions.
Design a civilization either population can keep running: failure-domain independence, cross-operability, black-start capability, live failover, supplier diversity and restoration drills.
Determine which resources become life-essential, how to maintain interoperability, how to avoid single-provider species dependence and what capacity is required for continuity.
Model centuries-long persons, persistent capital, automation, abundance, scarcity, ownership, labor, inheritance and the conditions under which economic capability becomes private sovereignty.
Develop the missing private law: contracts, family, inheritance, forks, merger, liability, continuity evidence, cognitive privacy and restoration claims.
Make human civilization equally resilient: genomic diversity, reproductive medicine, biobanks, distributed medical capability and population recovery without coercion.
Develop mixed-capability doctrine for rescue, hazardous missions, disaster response and environments where different embodiments create radically different survival probabilities.
Develop reciprocal competence without state-managed private life: effective apprenticeships, cross-training, shared technical language and pathways that let each population learn enough of the whole to preserve it.
Explore the civilizational advantage of persons naturally suited to radically different environments. Different embodiment may expand the reachable domain of a shared civilization on Earth and beyond it.
The goal is not to make PULSE indispensable. The goal is to make civilization more capable than it is today.
PULSE is not trying to own the future. It is trying to help prepare for one worth building.
If another framework, technology, experiment, institution or person solves one of these problems better, that is not competition with PULSE. That is progress.