If you could live forever, would you want to? The challenge of keeping your body alive seems impossible, but some scientists are working on an alternative. They want to create a digital copy of your "self" and keep that copy "alive"?long after your physical body has stopped functioning.

In effect, their plan is to clone a person electronically. Unlike ordinary physical clones – which have identical features as their parents, but which are independent organisms, each with a different conscious self – your electronic clone would believe itself to be you.?

One plan relies on the development of nanotechnology. Ray Kurzweil, a leading futurist, predicts that within two or?three decades we will have tiny transmitters that can be injected into the brain. Once there they would line up alongside neurons and monitor the details of the brain’s activity. They would then be able to transmit that information to receivers inside a special helmet, allowing us to map the brain.

As a further step, Kurzweil foresees using these tiny transmitters to connect you to a world of virtual reality. With the transmitters in place, you could think your way onto the internet. Instead of seeing pictures on a screen, you would see them in your mind. Rather than send emails to your friends, you could meet them on some virtual tropical beach and exchange messages in "virtual person".

For a futurist like Ray, this would be heaven, a virtual heaven. Once you upload the brain onto the internet and log on to that virtual world, your body can be left to decompose while your virtual self can play games for as long as you wish.

However, there is still a problem. To exist on the net, your virtual self will have to reside on the computer of a web-hosting company. These companies want to be paid real money, or they will delete your "self" and sell the space to someone else. With your body long gone how will you pay?