Has Week 8 got you despairing at the mortality of your fragile human form? I hope not. But if it has, how would you fancy giving immortality a go? The opportunity may be closer than you think.

Some believe that within our lifetimes, technology will have enabled us to create a post-mortal human race. Among these thinkers is futurist and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near. Kurzweil believes that in the near future we will be able to upload the human mind onto a computer. Death will no longer be the end; it will simply be the beginning of your virtual life. So if you’re feeling guilty about how much time you spend on the computer, just remember that at least you haven’t taken up residence inside one for all eternity.

It might be fun at first, living a virtual life. You could catch up with your not-yet-deceased friends on Facebook, and satiate yourself with endless entertainment in what would no doubt be the longest and loneliest Netflix and chill session known to man. After a while, however, you’d probably start to miss the good old days when you had a physical body. But never fear, there’s an easy solution – just get a virtual body instead, one that feels physical to you and is as convincing and detailed as your first body. Sorted.

Kurzweil, who claims to have biologically aged only two years in the space of sixteen, lives on a strict diet and consumes 100 nutritional pills a day, all in the hope of living long enough to ensure his own immortality, which he believes will be achievable by 2045. His faith in this extraordinary idea of backing up the human brain is not completely unfounded. The exponential rate at which technology is advancing gives him reason to believe that human progress is about to accelerate, and fast. In fact, it’s not just a post-mortal human race he believes in. The future Kurzweil foresees is a bizarre one in which we can augment our immune systems with nanobots, have virtual sex, and connect our brains directly to the cloud so that human thinking will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking.

He argues that this will all be possible once we reach The Singularity, which he defines as “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.” Yikes.

Although others, including Stephen Hawking, have stated that we may one day be capable of copying the brain onto a computer, it remains only theoretically possible. For one thing, there’s still so much we don’t understand about the brain, so surely it’s a little far-fetched to assume that we can simply transfer it into a virtual world. How do we even know if human consciousness would survive the switch over to digital?

But perhaps the biggest question is simply whether anyone would want this kind of life after death. Kurzweil seems up for virtual resurrection, but I think many of us would be more than a little anxious of exactly what we were getting ourselves into. I can’t help but imagine that it would just be like being trapped in The Sims. And even Sims have to face the Grim Reaper eventually.