Interfaith Dialogue on Avatar Immortality

The Avatar project created by Russian Billionaire Dmitry Itskov has a remarkable website, including this Interfaith Dialogue on the spiritual future of humanity as it approaches the technological ability to:

1. A robotic copy of a human body remotely controlled by BCI - 2015 - 2020
2. An Avatar in which a human brain is transplanted at the end of one's life - 2020 - 2025
3. An Avatar with an artificial brain in which a human personality is transplanted at the end of one's life - 2030 - 2035
4. A hologram like avatar - 2040 - 2045

There is a lot of heavy weight endorsement for this project if you look at the list of names in their letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon . There are a lot more names from the religious traditions on that letter as well, than are included in this video of interfaith dialogue. One of the names I had to look up was Dr. James Martin — "British author and entrepreneur and the largest individual benefactor to the University of Oxford in its 900-year history". I probably should have heard of him, A) because I have worked with computer information technology for 30 years, and B) because I work in a university where large donations by benefactors is the essential component for driving research and keeping university infrastructure and education alive.  I read the biography of Dr. William Osler several times, the masterful version written by Michael Bliss. When Osler was enticed to go to Johns Hopkins, one of the first hospitals combined with a teaching university level medical school, it was just an architectural blue print at the time. But it owed it's existence to visionary philanthropic benefactors and it was a turning point in philanthropic largesse. Millionaires were starting to seek immortality for their names by given money to universities instead of churches, except for eccentrics like Carnegie, who thought building free libraries and educating the massess was more worthy of the life energy contained in his horde of lucre.  It now seems like giving money to immortality projects is the ultimate form of philanthropic immortality.