> This is a classic story and fun in its own way, but thinking about humanity future reach for the stars (provided it happens) will most likely require us to mo

> This is a classic story and fun in its own way, but thinking about humanity future reach for the stars (provided it happens) will most likely require us to move to some trans human form. Think transformers or sentient ships. The human life is too short and body is too fragile for cosmic voyages. If we are going to be advanced enough to build interstellar ships, we should be advanced enough to travel in a different vessel. That's a bit pessimistic on the one hand, and overly optimistic on the other. While I would not suggest that classic "generation ships" would be possible given current technology or any possible technology that can be extrapolated from our current knowledge (the ecological complexities alone seem insurmountable), what pops out at the other end could very possibly be a mostly biological human with a consciousness downloaded from cold storage. My intuition is that while AGIs may be possible, and uploading, storing, and downloading a human mind may be possible, actually running a complete copy of a human mind in-silico in realtime may prove to be quite difficult, in any fashion that preserves a sense of continuity of experience and identity[0]. But a bioprinted copy of an uploaded brain (especially with integrated connections to ancillary hardware) transplanted into a meat-puppet could very well be prodded into running a more-or-less faithful approximation of the original mind, sufficiently well to fool itself that it was the same person. It's a rather roundabout way of doing things, but it would let us, as humans, explore "strange new worlds" personally. [0] That is, after you were done recompiling and optimizing the uploaded copy to be able to run semi-efficiently on a hardware substrate, I doubt that such an intellect would subjectively feel like it was still the same person it remembered being previously, which might be problematic if you're expecting it to make any important decisions.