to say goodbye to your physical body,

but, at least you still have your

consciousness, your mind, and your memories

stored safely in the cloud.

And in the virtual world,

anything that was once

real, physical, and finite,

can simply be replaced.

But,

Is eternal youth and everlasting life

all that it's made out to be?

Or is there a dark side

to cloud consciousness?

The science of being able to

digitize your brain and upload it to the cloud

is highly controversial and,

ultimately, inconclusive.

Some experts say

the technology will never exist,

but others promise that we'll have it by 2050.

In fact, there's already a waitlist.

An American startup called Nectome

claims that through a process called

they can preserve both the external

and internal structure of your brain

in perfect microscopic detail.

They do this by replacing

the blood flow in your brain

with embalming chemicals,

basically turning your meaty processor

into frozen glass.

And if you have haven't already guessed it,

you can't survive this procedure...

...at least, not physically.

In theory, you'll "live" forever, but,

but that's only if Nectome figures out

how to upload your brain to the cloud,

and then revive it.

Let's assume they do.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote that,

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain,

except death and taxes."

But it turns out,

immortality might come at an even higher price.

Opting to be uploaded into the cloud

might have some unforeseen consequences.

Today, the cloud is pretty much

just virtual storage.

You pay a company a monthly fee

to store all your family photos

so that their awkwardness

doesn't slow down your computer!

But now we're talking about you;

and all your unique traits,

and special qualities, and

all the wonderful things

you have to offer the world,

being uploaded to a server which

probably isn't powered by a benevolent

and somewhat scary-looking

bearded man in the sky.

More likely, your eHeaven

will be run by some tech giant,

who will have access to

your life's worth of data,

along with everyone else's.

Your continued existence

would be subscription-based,

requiring you to pay for storage and

maintenance on some high-tech server.

Your new home, and,

I suppose your identity as well,

will look like this.

Because this is really what the cloud is.

It's basically a wide interconnected network

of warehouses that are filled with hard drives,

and spread across multiple locations

so that your data can be stored

in several places at once;

just in case one of these warehouses

were to go offline.

So unless you were rich enough to build

your own little private network of hard drives,

the term "home office"

takes on a very dark meaning...

Would the company you subscribe to

be able to profit from their access

to your mind, memories, and talents?

What stops you from being copied

and coded as some kind of A.I.?

And then,

what if we got into androids or surrogacy?

If technology advances to the point

where we can cheat death,

why not cheat age or health?

For the first time ever,

you could have the body

you always wanted.

Forever!

But if you couldn't afford

a top of the line model,

what might you be forced to settle for?

But actually, what's far more likely

than you becoming an android,

or having your brain stored in the cloud,

is having your brain stored in a box!

Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov

is currently developing

what he calls a happiness box.

It's basically a computer that

can send sensations to your brain,

just like your body does today.

In fact, the happiness box is being developed

to replace your body.

If you don't totally get it,

think of the movie The Matrix.

That might be the closest thing

to immortality.

So what would you choose?

The red pill?

Or the blue pill?

Right now, we don't need to worry about it!

Without knowing if the technology will exist, or

when it will become available,

the most important question

we should be asking ourselves is

how to make the most

of the limited time we have.

Need some ideas?

Come back soon for more 'What If.'