This past weekend in New York City, nearly a thousand people from around the world gathered with the sole purpose of figuring out how to live forever.  The Global Future Congress (GF2045: Towards a New Strategy for Human Evolution) is the brainchild of Dmitry Itskov, a wealthy, 32-year-old Russian Internet entrepreneur committed to moving humankind to the only sustainable future he believes is possible: placing human brains in robot-avatars that don’t eat food, don’t drink water, don’t drive cars and don’t squander the dwindling resources of this planet.

This is not a joke. Itskov sincerely believes that “evolutionary transhumanism” is the only way to keep our species going. This transition must be based on two separate evolutions, he claims, one spiritual and the other “sci-tech.” Eventually, he hopes that his colleagues at GF2045 will find a way of first uploading the mind to robots that we can control, then eventually transplant actual brains into a “robot prosthesis” that can replace the body altogether.