One problem facing immortality besides the inevitable onslaught of Entropy is the fact that our bodies degenerate faster than our minds. The soul as a shape can be precisely recorded in our tissues, but those tissues fail regardless of what that shape is, suddenly and catastrophically at the end of our life. So ideally the goal would be to save the parts of our shape that make us [i]us[/i] and let the rest naturally fail. And that means...
...uploading the brain to a computer. I know it sounds hokey, but I'd be the first in line let me tell you. Well... maybe the third in line, since the first person would probably end up a drooling vegetable, and the third time's the charm? What that would allow is not so much the eternal preservation of my mind macrostate, but it would allow me to move. To [i]move[/i]!
The problem we face is that we cannot transport our consciousness to anyplace other than our own head. We can imagine it going other places, but even the holiest swami deep in meditation will cease once his head is caved in. If we could move out of our heads, even onto other faulty medium like a second brain or some form of optical holographic Star Trek storage stuff, then we'd have a distinct advantage in this: we could simulate our minds on a RAID.
One nice thing about Redundant Arrays of Independant Disks is that though they waste space and processing, if one disk fails you can cleanly swap it out due to the redundancy, without even having to shut your computer off. Think of how that would be for sentient minds. We'd have to have several brains (synthetic or no) all somehow closely linked and synchronized with each other, and when one failed, we could just swap it out, and thus exist ad infinitum.
We're still doomed if that happens, but it lends the lovely notion that one day we could be thought patterns stored in a Dyson sphere, preserved in our universe with minimum loss of Entropy, maximum use of usable energy. Those thought patterns don't have to be human; they could be whole virtual worlds of creatures mundane and fantastic. We could finally realize our wildest dreams not for real, but in a perfect simulation thereof.
Our own minds would degenerate naturally over the centuries, far faster than our Dyson sphere ran out of juice, so we'd never have to worry about reality striking. I mean, except for meteor impacts and stuff. But yeah... to be able to escape reality so totally as that, so perfectly and efficiently. I wish I could be alive to experience it happen in the next 10 millenia or so.
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