We're not saying all (or any) of these projects will come to fruition within the next few years, but we're absolutely willing to applaud these crazy, rich bastards for trying.

We love the character of Tony Stark because we wish all billionaires would spend their fortunes bringing sci-fi gadgets to life, instead of building gigantic yachts and buying private islands to hold gold-plated orgies. But there are actually a few Tony Starks out there, people who have big, ridiculous dreams and the cash to at least try to make them real.

5 Dmitry Itskov Wants to Make You Immortal

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With a net worth of over a billion dollars and at the tender age of 31, Russian media mogul Dmitry Itskov decided he was going right for the big one: immortality. Well, shit, it kind of makes dudes who blow their money buying professional sports franchises look like a bunch of douchebags.

He's assembled a team of 30 scientists (presumably mad) to pioneer a multistage project that would slowly turn you into a biological robot. The last phase is set for completion in 2045, at which point your brain will have been downloaded into an undying avatar, and we mean "avatar" as in the movie Avatar.

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"Of course my avatar has boobs. I'm a billionaire."

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The first stage, supposedly to be completed by 2020, offers you a robot version of yourself, controlled by a brain-computer interface -- what experts often call the "RoboCop" phase. The second stage is set to go into effect within five years of the first; this is the money shot of immortality, as it looks to actually transfer your human consciousness into an artificially created representation of your former biological glory.

The third stage would give our new cyborg overlords the ability to emote, possibly gambling on the fact that they'll allow us to live once they know mercy. The final stage is the marriage of each individual facet, resulting in a holographic representation of our former selves, complete with emotions, memories, and (hopefully) empathy.

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Making it awesome to robot-play video games in the future.

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So, yes, this guy is using his millions to bring Avatar to life, where a race of 'roided-out Smurfs are remote-controlled via someone else's brain, and our lives are almost exactly like a bad grad student cultural studies research paper and/or the plot to Disney's Pocahantas. The movie Avatar ends with genocide, but let's hope we can control ourselves a little better in real life.

Itskov's 2045 initiative produced a nifty inspirational video, claiming the project will lead us into a new way of life, devoid of violence and prejudice (he somehow thinks war will become a thing of the past, rather than simply being far more awesome). Once we make the switch to non-physical forms of existence, we'll be able to pool our collective mind-power to achieve hippie-inspired ends, such as spiritual self-improvement. Hey, laugh all you want; the point is that the guy is spending his cash on this instead of, say, a giant hot tub in the shape of his own penis.