Transhumanists believe that cutting-edge technologies can help us augment our minds and our bodies to transcend the human condition. Mills identifies as one, though he adds, “I think a new term is needed.”

The 24-year-old’s dirty blond hair, which reaches his mid-back, flowed down and out of the video chat window when we talked a few weeks ago. (He has a scruffy blond beard, too.) He was talking to me from Salt Lake City, Utah, sitting in his bright white house with exposed steel beams and a flat-screen TV set to a video of a bonfire—an eternal, if synthetic, flame. He’s talking low and slow. He’s not in much of a rush. Along with his parents and two sisters, he’s planning on living forever.

Last year, Mills launched the company Cryopets, which aims to use cryogenic technology to preserve freshly deceased animals, and eventually humans, forever—or until someone comes up with a cure for whatever killed them, in which case they’ll be thawed, healed, and set loose for a Second Coming.

His first guinea pig is an 80-pound labradoodle named Jasper, who is 16 and has a degenerating spine and hips. In the next few months, Jasper will be euthanized. Then, his blood will be drained and replaced with a medical grade antifreeze in order to preserve his cells. “Ice crystals are the enemy” for destroying body tissue, Mills tells me. Jasper will get loaded into a low-pressurized dewar, a vacuum-sealed vessel, that will be kept indefinitely at negative 196 degrees Celsius using liquid nitrogen, as a sort of Schrodinger’s dog. At first, Jasper will be stored in Mills’ garage—“I covered the windows in there, it’s a little intense for the neighbors”—until he transitions his cryogenic equipment to a larger, temperature-controlled facility next month.