Immortality is a difficult concept.

For the men of faith, it is achieved in the afterlife. For the skeptical, it is an unreachable dream.

Well, not until yesterday at least. I watched a podcast with a Harvard alumni telling that one of his professors signed up for a project in which the university will use thousands of hours of recorded video from his classes and all his research to build a virtual replica of the scholar to be used whenever needed.

He has become virtually immortal.

Immortal to the entire world but to himself.

In his final day, after he closes his eyes forever, his other self will continue to interact with students via a computer or cellphone.

Probably I should adopt a new pronoun and call him “it” from now on.

It, the virtually immortal professor. Once born a human from his mother’s womb in an instant no one could ever tell with precision. Then, evolved into his permanent digital form becoming it at a precise date and time when its UUID was inserted into the database.

Will this virtual world be open to any of us interested in eternity?

Maybe not. It may be a theater play whose cast never changes. The audience is always new. It may change by the minute. The actors, though, will remain the same.

(imagine going to the movies to watch Mission Impossible XXVI with young Tom Cruise and Ana de Armas)

Or, maybe we are all wrong, starting with the university leadership who had that brilliant idea.

Maybe future tests with the ever rotating audience will come with the finding that people don’t care about actors anymore. Standing out in the crowd, being the different one or having something else to add to a conversation turned into opaque ideas nobody pays attention anymore.

By the time all heroes are virtually immortal and turn expendable without being replaced by new faces, human attention may regress to a primal stage where the appetite will be for the ones more sexually attractive.

The virtually immortal professors who had transitioned from their biological existence at old age would not be a match for newborn virtual avatars with no past, no sins, no achievements.

And the audience will keep nodding.