Reproductive age? This hardly seems like the time.

Based on the distribution of humans and their ages it seems like many humans choose to leave their homes at approximately the age of twenty. This is also near the time when reproduction becomes safe for them.

That explains the age range but you also specified diverse genetics -

I am not confident in my ability to reconstruct humans from scans and my ultimate goal is to prevent the extinction of their species. Humans do not live very long, though perhaps with advanced medicine that can be extended.

I am probably inserting Elven biases here but 'while someone is bent on wiping them all out' does not strike me as an opportune time to bring children into the world.

Unless humans become immortal, they must reproduce or become extinct. Even with immortality their survival is not guaranteed, accidents do happen and humans do sometimes kill other humans. I do not know if humans share your race's preference to not reproduce in times of trouble but even if they do there is a difference between long term and immediate dangers. It seems that a danger which is not expected to become manifest within a child's lifetime is unlikely to discourage reproduction.

What exactly kills them, that they live such short lives?

There are several causes. Their circulatory system can accumulate progressive damage due to the congestion of critical blood vessels ultimately resulting in it shutting down. Their immune system also degrades over time making them more vulnerable to infections. The regulation mechanisms on cell replication can malfunction resulting in non-functional growths which consume an unsustainable amount of resources. In order to counter the cell replication problem they've evolved a mechanism by which properly working cells can only divide a finite number of times. There may also be other issues that are less obvious.

And you can't fix those problems?

Regular maintenance care could postpone their circulatory and cell replication issues and other more minor problems. It may also be possible to mitigate the problem with finite cell replication through regular treatment or substantial and advanced bio-engineering. Advanced bio-engineering is not my specialty and it would be difficult to make any confident predictions without testing on live subjects. In addition, the uncontrolled cell replication is only the most obvious detrimental effect of accumulated mutations from mistakes made during cell division and it is difficult to conceive of a fully general treatment for such issues. My own species is longer lived but not entirely immortal, we keep some measure of continuity by passing on memories and ideas to those who will outlive us.

- I see.

In my current form, I am immortal. It's possible that humans could take on a similar form. I just don't know if taking this form will have any negative long-term consequences for me let alone any humans who might follow in my example.

Well, it seems like it might have fewer negative long-term consequences than death. Could uploads theoretically be paused if necessary? If the data were safe it would be much likelier that the Valar could reembody them later, if they ever find me here.

Minds within a computer are similar to other data, though attempting to edit them would require a level of understanding I lack. They can be kept static easily, naturally that depends on the storage medium remaining intact. Hiding static backups is easy though hiding them in a way which can be located by friendly parties and not hostile ones is considerably more difficult.

Our backups have magically enforced forking protection. I can't duplicate that alone.

That is also a risk of remote backups though I was more focused on the ability of your Valar to find backups if this world is destroyed and obscure backups are all that remains. Perhaps your original comment was more focused on the possibility that minds encoded on computers with my methods experience deterioration over time.

It seemed unlikely, but given that the threat here is death and not specifically designed for unpleasantness, there seems a strong advantage to uploading humans at least for storage rather than letting them die. Perhaps I'm mistaken about the nature of likely hostile parties.

That's true, my mother might interrogate any individuals she finds but she has no reason to preserve them once they've yielded all the information she desires. My form of uploading is a thing a person does to themselves though, rather than something done to another person. It's possible that I could adapt the technique but I am uncertain about that. I believe that I'll be capable of awakening the mind-speech in the humans but it will be non-trivial to do so. A more direct uploading method might be more useful but I don't have the knowledge to implement such a thing at this time.

Nor do I. - What form of interrogation is likely?

My mother is extremely skilled with the mind-speech, she'll simply take what information she wishes to have from the minds she chooses to interrogate. It's possible that a very skilled practitioner could resist her but in that case she would likely use aversive stimulus to distract them from their defense. An even more skilled practitioner might be capable of deceiving her but it is difficult to deceive within the mind-speech.

I see.

It still seems better to back up dying humans if that's feasible.

Agreed.

I'm nearly certain that I can at least partially awaken the mind-speech in humans. It may require a multi-stage process to fully awaken it as it does in my people. If I do succeed in that I'm nearly certain that my skill of casting my mind into a computer can be taught. The more difficult question is whether I can reconstruct humans from my scans. I've done some preliminary trials and I can certainly reconstruct juvenile creatures from their world, but accurately recreating adults is more difficult.

I wonder if you could copy my chip's architecture and use that instead. Are there any other benefits to awakening mind-speech?

I cannot personally imagine living without it. The fact that I stopped being able to link freely with my siblings was one of the worst parts of beginning to question. If you link deeply with a person you can think faster and with practice you can replicate that effect without linking. Beyond its abilities in communications it also allows one to turn your attention to the deep dream and create worlds within your mind. The deep dream also allows for clearer recall of your memories.

We have osanwë, and it's wonderful, but orcs don't have it amongst themselves, and Dwarves don't have it at all and think theirs is a sensible design. Humans might or might not like it.