lifelike, low-cost avatars that can be uploaded with the contents of a human brain,

Get right up close to Dmitry Itskov and you will not pick up even the faintest hint of crazy. He is also never ruffled . Even if you ask the obvious question which he has encountered more than a few times since 2011, when he started "this project" . Namely: Are you insane?

"I hear that often," he said with a smile one recent afternoon in Manhattan. "There are quotes from people like Gandhi saying when people come up with new ideas they're called 'nuts' . Then everybody starts believing in the idea and nobody can remember a time when it seemed strange."

It is hard to imagine a day when the ideas championed by Itskov , 32, a Russian multimillionaire and former online media magnate, will not seem strange. His project, called the 2045 Initiative , for the year he hopes it is completed , envisions the mass production of lifelike, low-cost avatars that can be uploaded with the contents of a human brain, complete with all the particulars of consciousness and personality. This would be a digital copy of your mind in a nonbiological carrier, a version of a fully sentient person that could live for hundreds or thousands of years. Or longer. Itskov unabashedly drops the word "immortality" into conversation.

He has the attention, and in some cases the support, of august figures at Harvard, MIT and Berkeley . Roughly 30 of these experts will appear at the second 2045 Global Future Congress in June in Manhattan. Attendees will hear people like George M Church, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School. Martine A Rothblatt, another speaker at the conference , is flat-out optimistic. "This is no more wild than in the early '60s, when we saw the advent of liver and kidney transplants," she said. "People said at the time, 'This is totally crazy' . Now, 400 people have organs transplanted every day."

Scientists are indeed taking tiny steps toward melding humans and machine — from creating computers that can that can outplay humans (like Watson, the 'Jeopardy' winner) to technology that tracks a game player's heartbeat and his excitement (like the new Kinect) to digital tools for those with disabilities (like brain implants that can help quadriplegics move robotic arms).

Itskov said he will invest at least part of his fortune in such ventures, but his goal is not to become richer. In fact, he seems less like a businessman and more like the world's most ambitious utopian . He claimed that his avatars would end world hunger — because a machine doesn't need food — and would usher in a more peaceful and spiritual age, when people could stop worrying about the anxieties of day-to-day living.

"We need to show that we're actually here to save lives," he said. "To help the disabled, to cure diseases , to create technology that will allow us to answer some existential questions. Like what is the brain, what is life, what is consciousness and, finally, what is the universe?"