I disagree that we'd be limited by human life span. I think rather that we'd see us moving away from individuals making "breakthrough discoveries" to progress e

I disagree that we'd be limited by human life span. I think rather that we'd see us moving away from individuals making "breakthrough discoveries" to progress eventually being something that might take multiple generations of work and research by large numbers of people working together on a problem. We also have to keep in mind that once something has been discovered, it generally takes a lot less time to learn than it did for the person discovering it.