Next thousand years??  I'm banking on it in my lifetime!

To be more serious, I highly doubt it'll take 1000 years for humans to achieve "immortality."  We're already working on technology about regrowing organs, repairing degenerative damage to the brain, and other life prolonging techniques.  The entire purpose of the medical industry is the preservation and extension of life.  Combine that with efforts being made to simulate the actual neurons of the brain (see Lab comes one step closer to building artificial human brain for a recent overview on the subject), and it's only a matter of time before an individual can be seen to never "die."  Once an entire brain can be simulated, the next step becomes simulating a person's ACTUAL neurons.  That simulation can either be run from within a machine (see Ghost In The Shell) or merely stored there and exported back out into biological neurons in a host body. Obviously we're nowhere near that kind of thing, but the fact that we can even conceptualize the direction of it means it won't take another millennium.

Taking the discussion to a deeper level, the prospect raises a host of spiritual questions as well, the nature and uncertain "portability" of the human soul among others.  If a human mind could be completely simulated and then transferred to a host body or run from within the machine and still be indistinguishable from the original mind, couldn't it be conceivably done multiple times?  And what does it say about what it means to be an "individual" if the same individual's mind/soul can be flawlessly replicated?

I'll conclude my commentary with another extension of the concept... If a human mind could be perfectly stored or simulated within a computer, would that simulated mind have the same rights as its biological version?  It would be a boon for the field of psychological research to be able to ethically simulated the reactions of an actual human mind.  At some point, wouldn't we want to hook up multiple computers and simulate multiple people?  At some point, wouldn't we be able to simulate a virtual version of an entire world, populated with completely flawlessly replicated human minds?

Where I'm going with this is something called the Simulation Argument.  In a nutshell, it considers this progression of technology to be inevitable (assuming we as a species survive that long) and concludes based on sound statistical theory that either societies at that level make the conscious choice not to simulate virtual worlds or WE are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.  The notion smacks a little sci-fi and a lot Matrix, but check out the site for a more persuasive argument that I think makes a lot of sense.

You misinterpreted my vision of the future and furthermore stop comparing all future utopias to Star Trek, it's really ignorant.

]In all this back and for rhetoric, there is this one line of pure genius hidden between all the gilded bullshit Endyss vomits up...and the semi coherent ramplings of a madman named Leadsalad.