Immortality and Chan

After the group meditation sitting, we explored recent ideas of how humans can be made immortal through technology (or supposedly, anyway), and whether this defies the Chan idea of impermanence. I remember reading a science fiction novel as a teenager, The Silicon Man by Charles Platt, which explores the notion of downloadable humans: literally, humans that are able to be downloaded onto a computer and stored there permanently. One of the participants had asked an interesting question, and that is: if you had the ability to 'permanently' store greed, hatred or ignorance, would you want to preserve those traits indefinitely?
   It also makes me wonder too, how are the mechanisms of existence (desire, attachment to a body and so on) maintained through these hypothetical storage systems? Platt suggests that the machine world would be a kind of virtual heaven, because there is no longer the striving for material things for survival, but I have to wonder, would the downloaded human not try to invent other ways to continue its own existence, such as an endless striving to create on the virtual realm? It seems to be that any existence that continues across time entails a grasping at some organizing principle. I wonder, would these machines or downloaded 'spirits' not have an urge to survive continuously or maintain a certain state of being indefinitely? If that were the case, then there would always be the fear of losing the self even in a place of immortality.
   These questions might seem a trifle speculative, but I can foresee a time when immortality might become a discussion among Buddhists, especially with regards to whether physical immortality would defy the Buddhist concept of impermanence. I think that even if we built a perfect body, there would still be impermanence,  because no single though is continuously the same. Even the idea of immortality has no substance because we can never realize the 'never ending' in any given moment.