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With a net worth of over a billion dollars and at the tender age of 31 , Russian media mogul Dmitry Itskov decided he was going right for the big one: immortality.
Well, shit, it kind of makes dudes who blow their money buying professional sports franchises look like a bunch of douchebags. He's assembled a team of 30 scientists (presumably mad) to pioneer a multistage project that would slowly turn you into a biological robot. The last phase is set for completion in 2045, at which point your brain will have been downloaded into an undying avatar, and we mean "avatar" as in the movie Avatar.
The first stage, supposedly to be completed by 2020, offers you a robot version of yourself, controlled by a brain-computer interface -- what experts often call the "RoboCop" phase.
The second stage is set to go into effect within five years of the first; this is the money shot of immortality, as it looks to actually transfer your human consciousness into an artificially created representation of your former biological glory.
The third stage would give our new cyborg overlords the ability to emote, possibly gambling on the fact that they'll allow us to live once they know mercy. The final stage is the marriage of each individual facet, resulting in a holographic representation of our former selves, complete with emotions, memories, and (hopefully) empathy.
So, yes, this guy is using his millions to bring Avatar to life, where a race of 'roided-out Smurfs are remote-controlled via someone else's brain, and our lives are almost exactly like a bad grad student cultural studies research paper and/or the plot to Disney's Pocahantas.
The movie Avatar ends with genocide, but let's hope we can control ourselves a little better in real life. Itskov's 2045 initiative produced a nifty inspirational video, claiming the project will lead us into a new way of life, devoid of violence and prejudice (he somehow thinks war will become a thing of the past, rather than simply being far more awesome).
Once we make the switch to non-physical forms of existence, we'll be able to pool our collective mind-power to achieve hippie-inspired ends, such as spiritual self-improvement.
Hey, laugh all you want; the point is that the guy is spending his cash on this instead of, say, a giant hot tub in the shape of his own penis. Which is understandable since the accident. And yes, the goal is to make this technology available to everyone, granting even the working man equal opportunity at immortality -- Itskov believes the price will come down as mass production is achieved. So you too will be able to live as a cyborg for the price of an automobile.
Today, Itskov is making presentations to billionaires and is attempting to raise funding for the first practical application of the avatar project: an artificial body controlled by the mind that he says can be ready in just three to five years with proper funding, which would immediately be great for, say, rescuers and firefighters.
Yes, he's talking about technology we saw in Iron Man 3 . Jesus, nobody show this guy a copy of Beyond Thunderdome.
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