A SILICON Valley billionaire is paying the ultimate price for the chance of immortality: death.

Well that, and a spare ten grand.

2 Sam Altman backs startups through his company Y Combinator Credit: Getty - Contributor

Entrepreneur Sam Altman is one of 25 people who have splashed the cash to join a waiting list at Nectome – a startup that promises to upload your brain into a computer to grant eternal life to your consciousness.

There's just one (huge) catch: it has to kill you first.

The process, as described in MIT Technology Review, involves embalming your brain for it to potentially be simulated later in a computer.

The living customer would be hooked up to a machine and then pumped full of Nectome's custom embalming chemicals.

The method is "100 per cent fatal", claims the company.

“The user experience will be identical to physician-assisted suicide,” Nectome's co-founder Robert McIntyre revealed to the publication.

"Our mission is to preserve your brain well enough to keep all its memories intact: from that great chapter of your favorite book to the feeling of cold winter air, baking an apple pie, or having dinner with your friends and family," writes Nectome on its site.

2 For $10,000., startup Nectome will pump you full of embalming chemicals and upload you brain to a computer Credit: Getty - Contributor

"We believe that within the current century it will be feasible to digitise this information and use it to recreate your consciousness."

The reality, however, is that physician-assisted suicide is currently only legal in five out of 50 US states, and individuals seeking it must have a terminal illness, as well as a prognosis of six months or less to live.

As barmy as it sounds, the idea of uploading our consciousness into a computer is gaining ground among techies and scientists.

Futurologist Dr Ian Pearson previously told The Sun that in 50 years time we'll be able to transfer our brains to the cloud (tech speak for online storage).

That way you'll be able to "use any android that you feel like to inhabit the real world", he said.

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Altman, whose company Y Combinator funds startups, is best buds with fellow Silicon Valley billionaire (and PayPal co-founder) Peter Thiel.

The two were recently lampooned, when Altman let slip that they were planning to escape a potential apocalypse by hiding in the bunker in Thiel's home in New Zealand.

But if you're living in a computer, do you even have to worry about the end of days?

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