The largest single barrier to human development is the physical lifespan.  

 

What you accomplish in life is lost when you die.  In order for your life's work to continue, several factors have to be put in place.  The biggest factor is your personal drive to accomplish your goals.  Only you can perpetuate them, but you are limited by physical degeneration and ultimate death.

 

Typically, career productivity spans about thirty years before most of what you accomplish is simply lost should you fail to record your advancements.  Even if you do find a way to preserve your discoveries, the skills you gain in your life, the vision, the drive to achieve, and more importantly, your personality, are gone after you die.  

 

Now, there is real hope.  Recent scientific discoveries have found a way to completely eliminate death.

 

Yes!  Completely stop the dying process. 

 

How can this be possible, you may ask?

 

The answer has been there all along in the DNA.  DNA is our program of life.   Soon, it will be possible to simply reprogram the human body to regenerate the cells, instead of falling apart after so many years and die.  The results:  indefinite life.

 

Why is this process being kept quiet?  There are several scientific and social barriers keeping immortality under wraps.

 

Professionally, doctors and scientists are quite aware of the possibilities of immortality, but they are under the scrutiny of the scientific community to maintain thier reputation as a professional and not make rash, untested claims.  The science of reprogramming the human body is still being tested.  Anything that changes humanity is still controversial both scientifically and morally.

 

One of the biggest challenges to immortality is the church, or religion.  What would happen to religion if the basic tenets of religion: faith, heaven, life after death, or God, if death becomes less prominent?  That's another story for another time.

 

Of course, people will still die, just not as quickly.  Lifespans would go into the hundreds of years, maybe the thousands.  Old age would be a thing of past, since the cells would constantly regenerate, speculatively keeping your age somewhere in your twenties, as far as appearance is concerned. 

 

Productively, humans would be able to continue developing skills for thousands of years.  Human development would progress geometrically by building on each other's skills throughout a span of many hundreds or even thousands of years, instead of just thirty, as it is now.

 

Imagine if Dr. Albert Einstein was still coming up with theories for space and time, or if Thomas Edison was still making his wonderful inventions, or if Steven Hawking could collaborate with Einstein.  Don't you think humanity would already be exploring the universe in innumerous ways, from worm holes to quantum drives, to whatever?  No doubt, other intelligent beings of the universe would be common contacts for trade and exchanges of information on health, science, engineering, and social development.

 

In summary, scientific advancement is held back by individual lifespan.  This lifespan is about to be increased by hundreds of years, thus boosting humanity into super advancement.  Two hundred years of deathless development would equal two thousand years of the present system.