Centuries ago, mankind discovered a way to transfer consciousness into a new body, making death a mere inconvenience. Since then, we’ve been providing an unparalleled pedigree of human sleeves to only the most discerning clientele.

– Psychasec. Live forever in the body you deserve.

First, there will contain a lot of spoilers inside. If you still not watch the show you can read this at your own risk.

Altered Carbon, a recent Netflix original series, the story of a man called Takeshi Kovacs, hired by ultra-rich guy Laurens Bancroft as a PI to investigate a murder of himself. In the world of Altered Carbon, humans now can transfer their consciousness into something called stack and put it in new sleeves (New word for bodies.) But after I Binge all 10 episodes one thing kept bothering me, “is the one that wakes up in new sleeves the same person?”

Do you know how Copy and Paste work on the computer? There is something called clipboard in your computer’s OS.

1. When you copy something, that clipboard will create a copy of it and store the copy inside.
2. And when you Paste something, it will copy the thing from a clipboard and put it in your choosing destination.

Notice something interesting from those statements? Yes, I said nothing about the original file got delete or destroy, right? The original still there, no matter how many times you Paste it.

And how does this relate to Altered Carbon? Well In the story, they can create a twin that thinks they are the same person by upload backup consciousness into the spare body while the real one is still alive!

And now we’re back to Copy and Paste classroom. Do you know that you can copy many file formats, picture, and text with this function? (If you don’t believe me, just try it with a photo on this blog.)But there’s one slight little problem with that, you can’t just Paste any format into any place you want. Yes, you can try to copy a picture and paste it into Microsoft Word it’ll work, but It won’t work if you try to paste it on notepad.

Now I want you to try something, okay?

1. Open your Microsoft word choose a font that is not the default one, something different, something unique.
2. Now type something and Copy it into notepad, close your Microsoft word you won’t need that anymore.
3. Open your Microsoft Word again now do the opposite, copy a file from notepad and paste it into your new Microsoft Word document.

My guess is that your new text will not be the same font from the first one.

There’s a scene that the rich peoples show each other a unique thing at the dining party, one of them bring a snake. What so special about the snake? Well…it used to be human before, and I now quote what she said in the show.

“I was curious what would happen to a man if you downloaded him into a reptile. The neomammalian complex, stuffed into the most base of basal ganglia…For science. Turns out you go quite mad. I tried resleeving him once, and he just lay on the ground and writhed. So now he’s a snake forever.”

Again, notice something similar? That thing called stack in the show is just an update clipboard of consciousness. And one thing that we learn from Copy and Paste 101 today is that “Copy and the original are not the same just look-alike in every detail.”

So, is it possible that the people who think they can just resleeve and avoid death actually die? The meth that thinks they live for a hundred years actually live for just a week before they change a sleeve and go to the land beyond.

There’s a scene in the show that mentions a character talking about changing sleeve for work travel from San Francisco to Osaka in an instant. Yes, the character thinks they just hop into other body do the meeting and then jump back like nothing has happened.

But what if they’re wrong? Don’t forget! On the computer, you can also Cut. This is the same as copy, but it also removes the object from the document at the same time.

What if they just POOF! And everything turns to black forever while another body awake with the last memory thinking the process is successful. Maybe this technology is not a solution for an immortal life but just another way to suicide without decrease the earth population.

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After reading this long, you may think, “Bah, this is just a science fiction why bother.” But don’t forget that some of our technology today is nothing but a science fiction century ago a supercomputer in a side of a palm that can connect everyone on earth, goggles that can help you see at night, a flying chunk of metal that can carry people around the world, a superweapon that can wipe the entire city in one go.

Many famous scientists also believe we can do this, that we can map the human brain and copy or even recreate it to transfer human consciousness into other things. We just lack the technology and knowledge to do that.

Heck, some even believe we only need 40-50 years from now for the technology to catch up with this idea.

What about you? If this technology is real, will you risk your own life for something that can be an illusion of immortality but a subtle way of suicide?