What if our consciousness could live on in the form of a digital avatar long after we are gone? It is a question that was propelled into popular consciousness and culture with dystopian TV show Black Mirror's "San Junipero" episode from 2016.
One scientist, Russian transhumanist and life extensionist Alexey Turchin, believes that the Promethean technological idea could come true with the aid of the Dyson Sphere, a megastructure built in space that would surround a star and capture its power, a report by Popular Mechanics explains.
The way that this would work is that the Dyson Sphere megastructure would draw from its massive reserves of energy to collect enough personal and historical data regarding a person's life to build a like-for-like digital copy of that person. Once that copy was made it would be run through a Matrix-like simulation allowing it to relive the person's entire life. Much like in "San Junipero," after life had run its course, the copy would then be transferred to a digital afterlife where they could spend the rest of their days with digital copies of friends, lovers, and family.
The idea may sound wonderful to some, but it comes with a megastructure-sized caveat — we are nowhere near possessing the technology required to build a Dyson Sphere. That hasn't dissuaded transhumanist Alexey Turchin, who has been working on a "Plan C" for an "Immortality Roadmap" project, based on the Dyson Sphere concept, alongside fellow researcher Maxim Chernyakov.
After a classmate of his died when he was 11 years old, Turchin "started to think in science-fiction terms about what could be done," he told Popular Mechanics. In 2007, Turchin joined the Russian Transhumanist Movement, which aims to use technology to allow humans to transcend their physical and intellectual limitations. Recently, Turchin and Chernyakov outlined their "Immortality Roadmap" in a paper called "Classification of Approaches to Technological Resurrection."
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