Is it possible to never die?

No human being has ever lived more than about 130 years (not including mythical figures such as Methuselah in The Bible) and although future medical advances may make it possible to live longer than that, I see no reason to believe that it will ever become possible for a person to never die. Everyone dies eventually. Just make good use of your time while you are still alive.

Answer:

Advances in medical science and technology are increasing our life span yearly. This includes the identification and treatment of disease and the understanding of the telomeres, molecular chains which align the DNA molecule during the replication process to allow the vital DNA molecule to be copied correctly and prevent any of the vital DNA sequences being lost. Ultimately this could extend our life so we are essentially immortal.

If bodily immortality is not essential, there is thought to allowing the personality and memories to be copied to other media and downloaded to artificial bodies or housed indefinitely in other devices. This is discussed in The Age of Spiritual Machinesa book by futurist Ray Kurzweil.

Additional answer:

All the technology that you present as a reason why it is indeed possible to never die remains speculative; it may or may not be made to work, and at the present time (February 25, 2010 as I type) we still have no solid reason to expect that anyone is going to live much beyond the age of 130. It is still true, as I said in my original answer, that the human lifespan may be extended by future medical advances. And possibly it will be even further extended by more exotic techniques such as downloading the human mind into computers. Even then it will not become possible to never die, although it may be possible to live for an extremely long time. After all, the universe itself is not expected to last forever. Eventually the stars will burn out. There is only a finite amount of usable energy in the universe. Now, you may at this point say that we cannot be sure what science will discover in the future, and perhaps there is some inexhaustible source of energy waiting to be discovered. Again, that is purely speculative. Nonetheless, in a theoretical sense, there is some possibility that for reasons not presently known, it will someday become possible to never die. I don't think it is a very strong possibility, but I can't rule it out. However, I do think that anyone now living who expects never to die is being ridiculously optimistic. We will eventually die. So enjoy your life while you can.