I don't know, to me it seems like biomedical engineering and manipulation will take off and develop a lot sooner than people willingly "upload" their minds to a

I don't know, to me it seems like biomedical engineering and manipulation will take off and develop a lot sooner than people willingly "upload" their minds to a machine – itself a dubious idea full of problems. I think it's far more likely that current-state humans won't be exploring the stars, but a genetically modified version of them will be. I think there is much less angst regarding the idea of upgrading humanity piecemeal, a la the Ship of Theseus, than there is to fully discarding one's body for a digital existence. This has already sort of happened over the last few hundred years with the concept of transplantable organs. Prior to the widespread acceptable of the interchangeability of organs, it was not uncommon to think that your self and body are unified and linked in a way that implied organ transplation was problematic or undesirable. And on that note - is it just me, or are biological visions of humanity's future fairly scarce in sci-fi and in futurism (another name for sci-fi)? My guess is because such topics seem dominated by software engineers, physicists, etc. that are less interested in biology.