I've been pondering this for a while: once we have artificial gravity in space (from rotation, for instance), would we ever want to shackle ourselves to the gravity of a foreign planet? It would be so much easier just to create the ideal environment in a large, rotating cylinder instead of having adjust a planet's environment to our needs. Take this new discovery for instance. Imagine that this planet is 400m years y…
I wouldn't be surprised if we develop brain uploads sometime in the next 400 years, at which point the focus on trying to recreate earth-like environments anywhere will look silly. There's probably a lot of other advancements over the next few centuries that we can't imagine. Our current view of space colonization is probably going to have as much of a connection to the future as the Tower of Babel had to the Apollo…
If your biological brain is you (to you only), then a digital copy is not you, it's a clone of you.
Also then, the only immortality we can hope to achieve is through those head jars so famous in Futurama.