i have spent quite a bit of time contemplating a way out of the futility of finite existence via the idea of transferring consciousness from one host to another. swapping out parts on an old body is inefficient, when you could just get a new body that was built from a clone of yourself, perhaps with the genetics modified a little. for example, if i was to clone myself, my clone would be xx and would develop that way.
we'd have to find a way to generate brain dead clones that can grow without experiencing it, so that we could upload ourselves into them. it might take a while. you'd have to be able to back up your brain to disk to do this.
the issue is the same as with ai - this would require immense amounts of data, to the point that it isn't feasible. i had set myself a pascal's wager with this, but abandoned it as impossible. we'd need quantum computing first, and then some paradigm shift in data storage, which is reaching it's limits.
a better approach to immortality may lie in crspr style gene editing that turns off cell death, but you'd probably just end up with cancer. there are reasons we die, at the cellular level. if we could address and undo those, we wouldn't necessarily need to.
however, we'd have to eliminate microbes, as well, or we'd just get sick and die, eventually. there's a story by isaac asimov about this.
ultimately, the hard truth is that we're evolved to die. we're vessels for the dna, which we increasingly understand and may be able to take control of in the near future, inverting the relationship. at that point, it's no longer clear what we even are at all; we'd become free to define or redefine what we are, as a species.