When you think of the word "immortality" it is hard not to feel a tingling excitement, even if those feelings are quickly followed by a sense of something more biblical, almost God-like, and then by something darker lurking in the shadow of the word.

As Western science still has not found the immortality gene, it is perhaps not surprising that in Silicon Valley and on the outskirts of Moscow the eccentric wealthy (and it always is the eccentric wealthy) are now turning their attention and their money to projects that are promising to deliver a new version of the age-old fantasy (or folly) of everlasting life: digital immortality. And this time it may actually work.

For writer Stephen Cave, author of the new book Immortality, digital immortality does not refer to the "legacy" we have left on our Facebook pages. Cave's book explores the quest to live for ever and how he believes it has been the driving force behind civilisations, coming to a climax in modern science. "Digital immortality," he says, "is about there being a silicon you for when the physical you dies" as a kind of "Plan B if bioscience fails to deliver an actual biological immortality".

And of course, he adds, biological immortality would not stop you being run over by a bus.

"So your brain is scanned and your essence uploaded into a digital form of bits and bytes, and this whole brain emulation can be saved in a computer's memory banks ready to be brought back to life as an avatar in a virtual world like Second Life, or even in the body of an artificially intelligent robot that is a replica of who we were."

For Cave, though, this "is not true immortality" as "you physically die" and this new you, "even though its behaviour could fool your mum", is then just a copy. A copy that, he admits, could carry on growing, marrying and even having children.

Currently, however, this is still "almost science fiction", as there are "three big challenges" that stand between us and digital immortality challenges that projects such as Carbon Copies and Russia 2045 already believe they can overcome within 40 years.

"The first is that we have to be able to read all the information that makes up who you are, and this is likely to be achieved destructively by removing the human brain from the body and then preserving, slicing and scanning in the data it contains. Then there is the challenge to store an amount of information many millions of orders of magnitude bigger than the current computer systems. And finally we need to find a way to animate it."

In the end, Cave argues, "theoretically the problems of digital immortality seem solvable, but whether the solutions are practical is another story... Although when it does happen it is simply inevitable that the rich will get there as they have the most power among us."

Others are more positive about the prospect of true digital immortality within a generation.

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Will scientists ever discover the secret of immortality?