Humans have yearned for immortality for as long as we‘ve understood our fragile permanence. But while dodging the Grim Reaper was once relegated to the realm of religious myth, now technology is attempting to find the cure for death. Most popular is the idea of cryopreservation — that is, any process which preserves biological tissues by storing them at extremely cold temperatures — which can be traced back to a 1931 science fiction novel, “The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones. The first in a series of adventure tales about the titular Professor Jameson, the story includes a detailed description of the professor freezing his brain by sending it into space, where it is eventually revived and installed into a mechanical body.

Jones’ ideas were so provocative, they inspired American academic Robert Ettinger to write a 1962 non-fiction book, “The Prospect of Immortality.” In 1976, Ettinger founded the Cryonics Institute, a nonprofit that freezes both humans and pets in the hope of someday reviving them, and the cryopreservation movement was born.

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Dr. Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston hopes to pick up the movement where Jones left off, albeit with the significant twist that his version does not require freezing. A research fellow at Melbourne’s Monash University, Zeleznikow-Johnston wrote the new book, "The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death," which makes the case that cryopreservation is possible and should be more widely available. Rejecting the popular notion that death endows life with meaning as “palliative philosophy,” Zeleznikow-Johnston’s book instead argues a human’s connectome — a high-resolution map of all their brain connections — could be theoretically recorded perfectly before they die.

Once that happens, that same internal brain activity could be recreated through high-powered computers, while a new brain is grown in a vat via stem cells or some combination of the two. As such, Zeleznikow-Johnston is proposing a spiritual descendant to the cryonics movement (which he dismisses as “unscientific” and “unsubstantiated”), one where the focus is not on preserving tissues but on the “data,” so to speak, of our distinct connectomes.

"We have very strong evidence that the static structure of the neurons is enough to hold onto someone's memories and personality."

“Within this science fiction is a kernel of truth: with sufficient understanding of how the brain enables a person to be who they are, it might be possible to place a dying individual in a state from which they could one day be revived,” Zeleznikow-Johnston writes in his book. From there he explores how the current state of neuroscientific recording and tissue preservation is such that, while his dream is currently not possible, technologies like chemical vitrification (a process for hardening the outer eggs of embryos, similar to how glass is hardened) enable us to preserve a person’s brain well enough that the connectome could also be preserved.

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