Eternal life could be within our reach thanks to new digital technologies, as long as you’re happy to leave your physical body permanently and become a living app, claims a Russian billionaire.

For centuries, humans have searched for the elixir of life: a way to ward off the effects of aging or even extend lifespan by decades.

Thanks to new AI and metaverse technologies, we might finally be getting closer. That is at least the opinion of a Russian billionaire, Dmitry Itskov, who believes that people will one day be able to live forever.

Itskov, who made his fortune with a Moscow-based media company, is part of the ‘2045 Initiative’ which aims to “eliminate aging and even death” and push the limits of the human body.

The project argues that artificial bodies will appear in 2045, allowing people to break out of their old bodies and adopt new ones with the help of the Internet.

In the 2045 Initiative manifesto, Itskov says: “People will make independent decisions about the extension of their lives and the possibilities of personal development in a new body after the resources of the biological body have been exhausted.”

The concept, called mind upload, would see people make digital copies of their minds that could live freely in cyberspace, without biological restrictions.

Companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink are investigating brain-computer interfaces that could form the basis of future whole-brain uploads.

Self-described futurist Tom Cheesewright told the Daily Star that technology could one day allow us to “input our consciousness” into artificial intelligence and virtual reality robots, but we are still a long way from that.

He said: “Ultimately, I think it’s possible.

“You would have to download the software from all over your body and recreate it in a way that the brain feels is plausible. Replicating that inside a machine is an enormously complex proposition that we are a long way from achieving.”