Even so, we’re unlikely to know that for certain until we try. And it’s quite likely that early uploads, like Su-Yong Shu, will be missing some key piece or have some other inaccuracy in their simulation that will cause them to behave not-quite-right. Perhaps it’ll manifest as a creeping insanity, as in Su-Yong’s case. Perhaps it will be too subtle to notice. Or perhaps it will show up in some other way entirely.

Finally, I’ve written about more than neuroscience in Crux. And in particular I’ve written about the impact of climate change. Zoe, the storm that hits the eastern seaboard at the end of Crux, is a piece of fiction, but a plausible one. When I wrote the scenes with Zoe, in late 2012, superstorm Sandy had not yet appeared. (Imagine my surprise, when, a few weeks after I wrote about it, a late season storm struck the eastern seaboard and impacted a presidential election!) Since then, most of the public has learned that hurricanes can indeed arrive in early November, and that they feed off the power of warm surface waters in the Atlantic. It’s impossible to say that a changing climate caused a particular storm. But what it is possible to say is that the general warming we’ve experienced has made storms like Zoe (and Sandy) many times more likely to occur. As the planet continues to warm, we’ll see far more of them.

Similarly, the crime for which Shiva was exiled, the deliberate release of a virus that genetically tweaked coral reefs to increase their odds of survival, is not so completely far-fetched. As oceans warm and grow more acidic, corals have a harder and harder time surviving. The best estimate is that, by 2100, roughly half of all coral species in existence today will go extinct. But, of course, there are some corals that thrive in extremely warm water or extremely acidic water. They’re able to because of various genes they carry that have evolved for those conditions. In 2012, two research projects set out to find the genes that allow some coral species to survive in warm waters. It’s not a large leap to imagine a similar project searching for acidity-survival genes. And from there, the idea of deliberately transplanting such genes into corals that are struggling becomes rather tempting. Of course, this would certainly constitute the release of a “GMO” into the wild, and it would be met with tremendous opposition. (A simpler, less controversial, path would be to transport coral “cuttings” from hardy species into areas where corals are dying. Of course, given the millions of square miles of coral reefs in the world’s oceans, that would also be incredibly more labor intensive.)