Eternal life on the cloud? It’s a path riddled with big questions.

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Eternal life has fascinated humans since time immemorial. Ancient Egyptians mummified their pharaohs, Chinese emperors sought the elixir of life, Greek myths spoke of ambrosia granting eternal youth, and India has had its legendary ‘Chiranjeevi’ immortals.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and we find ourselves still chasing that dream of immortality—but now, computer code is turning it into silicon reality. Welcome to digital immortality, where the line between human existence and a hard drive is blurred. We are now uploading consciousness to the cloud, where our digital doppelgängers can live on forever, free from the constraints of biology and bad hair days.

While ancient Egyptians preserved bodies, we are now looking to preserve human minds. Our journey begins in 2018 with Nectome, a startup that snagged an incredible $960,000 federal grant to work on preserving brains in microscopic detail. Its ultimate goal? To digitally upload minds.

There’s just one tiny catch: its process is currently fatal. For $10,000, it will turn your brain to rubber and freeze it. The idea is that at some point later, technology will advance enough that you could be revived—in this case, most likely by ‘scanning’ and ‘uploading’ your brain.

Talk about a killer app! In 2019, scientists created an artificial neural network mimicking a worm’s brain, essentially uploading its mind into a computer. It’s a far cry from human consciousness, but hey, even Facebook started with just rating college students’ photos. The EU’s Human Brain Project, launched in 2013, aims to create a functional computer model of the organ.