alt Hacker NewsLife extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness soon resulting in accidental death. Finally, for all we know there is a long tail of obscure disease processes that only kick in after lifespans no one has as yet ever reached-and even though that too might eventually be solved, if it takes you a thousand years to find the first case of such a disease, how many will die from it before you find a cure?
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> it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play
Cory Doctorow's wonderful sci-fi book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" explored exactly this in interesting ways. In the book people in the future can live essentially forever by transferring their consciousness into new bodies. They can also back up the contents of their consciousness, something most people do nightly but certainly before doing some dangerous extreme sport. Doing dangerous things without backing yourself up is considered tantamount to suicide since you lose all the memories and personal growth, essentially the person you became since your last backup.
People do get bored and will sometimes choose to "deadhead" for hundreds of years at a time, which is putting yourself into stasis and skipping those centuries. The book is full of provocative ideas about how practical immortality might actually work on a personal and societal level.
Maybe. There's plenty of science fiction that addresses this. For example the "meths" (short for Methuselah) in altered carbon, who achieve immortality by making backups of their brains that can be spawned to cloned bodies. You could recover from accidents, or roll back to before the obscure disease kicked in
To even consider "immortal" as possible suggests someone hasn't had a lot of formal math training. Infinity is rather large. In an infinite amount of time, any possible conjunction of circumstances that could cause an immortality system to fail will happen. Talking in thousands, millions or even billions of years doesn't even need to be rounded to be basically zero when compared to eternity.
Death is a certainty. No amount of technology can change that even theoretically. We don't even have reason to be confident that the universe itself is eternal, let alone any component of it.