An eventual limitation on lifespan would be the finite capacity of human memory. Somehow increasing the memory available & the mental processing ability so I can do something meaningful with the data may be feasible, but would the result still be 'me'?

This page is one of my favorites on this website. I find it fitting, therefore, to publish this dialog that I've carried out somewhere else here. I apologize if you find it wanting.

I was told:
"Of course the world you live in is real, but only for a little while. Then you will die. In all likelihood all memory of you will die. If you are quite content to be erased in this way, no sense arguing about the subject."

My reply was:
"It is not dying per se that bothers me. The way I read most religions, the afterlife they speak of can be either in time or outside of time. For immortality to be outside of time, our "selves" would have to be changed so much that essentially nothing of the "self" would be preserved. (Memories are temporal, actions are temporal, thoughts are temporal). So an after life outside of time would mean oblivion to me, or at least to the characteristics I value.

Now, the other option is an after life within time. This would supposedly allow for the preservation of some recognizable part of the self, and could go by the name of immortality proper. My problem is that immortality sounds tedious. It literally means living forever. Not a thousand years, not a billion, but eternally. If the part of "I" that lived eternally would have any semblance to what I currently call by that word, I would grow weary after a while. So I wouldn't want that either. To this, some people tell me that I don't understand, the afterlife would be bathed in the "divine and delicious light and music of God, of which no weariness can come." Sure, that could be. But to me, that is the equivalent of sitting on a couch, with an IV of hallucinogenics dripping into you. You supposedly never get bored of it. But you are passive. And therefore it is oblivion nonetheless.

No, I am not afraid of death, of oblivion. After all, even stars "die" and possibly even the universe will end at some point. It is the prospect of living a shorter life than I would wish it that I am not content with. Now it could be that I only wish to live 80 years, or it could be that I wish to live 800. I would like to have the choice.

It is our greatest failure, and a shame to us as a civilized and scientific species, as well as a reminder of our animal origins, that we are still in thrall to aging.
Now, save for some unforeseen accident, I have a few decades left in this body. But I wish that we could come up with a cure for the damage brought about by aging. After some research I am convinced that it is theoretically possible to slow aging down. It might not arrive in my lifetime. But I would like my children or my grandchildren, and if you have children, your children or grandchildren, to have the choice of getting to choose when they die, or to put it another way, to decide when they have lived enough.

I put my faith in men and their reason, not in hopes of benevolent gods. I find it a safer, and far more comforting, bet."

I am posting this here because I am curious on how other people here feel about this subject.

I suggest you look it up in the dictionary. I hope it doesn't bring you down to earth with too much of a bump!

A political programme of action to be taken now should not be focused on such advances, I think. Of course, scientific and technological progress is a good thing and one we should encourage with our political measures, but there are more practical things we should be doing to reduce sufffering.

Except you can't virtually get rid of earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, hurricanes, asteroid impacts, people and other critters that want to kill you, etc. We'd still have to eat and deal with the inevitable consequences of eating. (We might devise a technological alternative to sleep.) Escaping reality--"real" reality--has never been a good thing. I can't imagine it ever would be.

Another way is to keep our bodies alive and live in virtual reality. If you can make reality anything you desire, have you made utopia for everyone?