The Marvellous Adventures of Me

I’ve been thinking about immortality the past few weeks.

If you take immortality as an eventual certainty (based on continued exponential technological and scientific progress) the only question that remains is, how will we do it? What are the mechanics of our species coming immortality? I choose to leave the moral and ethical questions by the wayside as they don’t particularly interest me, what really captivates my mind is the question of how, not why, whether or when.

My current working theory is that rather than attempting to make the human body last forever, we will choose to take the mind out of the frighteningly fallible human body and preserve it, in it’s entirety, in electronic form. I am not talking about removing and preserving the brain, this would possibly work for a short while but eventually the cells of the brain would oxidize and the brain would die. In order to truly preserve a human mind we would need the technology to perform a three dimensional scan of the brain, accurate down to the atom/neuron level, and then reproduce this scanned material in either a new biological brain or a computer that exactly simulates a human brain, possibly in the same basic way that “virtual pc’s” do that exist today.

This new electronic brain would be immune to aging, disease, accidental death and disaster. We would have human minds that live for not hundreds or thousands of years but potentially for millions/billions/trillions of years.

What would a million year old human mind do for fun?