> all of the space exploration.

How does the receiving technology get built? Surely at least someone will have to go there the first time, and they will have to take the long way. It will still be quite a problem to get to a system 10k light years away.

Is YC accepting applications for interstellar body rental stations like Hertz is for cars? I'd bootstrap it, but I think this requires venture scale funding.

Well, Hertz is selling off their whole Extraterrestrial Vehicle (EV) fleet, so it’s probably not profitable enough for VCs.

You just have to first hack (or maybe even just ask nicely) another suitable species (or their technological artifacts) wherever you want to go, and have them create the biological substrate and download/upload mechanism on their end. This limits travel to already inhabited corners of the universe, but that's better than nothing I suppose.

The tricky thing is that hacking is usually an iterative process, and these iterations are going to be an extreme exercise in patience.

Actually, another tricky thing: how do you know that the other end is actually cooperating? If the aliens are dicks they could give you the thumbs up while having zero intention to reconstitute your consciousness. If you wanted to round-trip some brave soul as a means of verifying everything works, they could just send one of their own minds back instead, just for the fun of wreaking havoc.

> The tricky thing is that hacking is usually an iterative process, and these iterations are going to be an extreme exercise in patience.

No kidding! On the first try you accidentally end up causing a revolution because the targets/specimens ended up learning about the scientific method, gunpowder, and other dangerous things instead of just getting a proper advanced consciousness installed. So now all you can do is try to shape said species technological progress towards building the correct technology that you can hijack for your own purposes when ready.

"Just be patient"

> You just have to first hack … another suitable species (or their technological artifacts) wherever you want to go, and have them create the biological substrate and download/upload mechanism on their end.

I presume humans are the result of such a hack a few billion years ago.

Interstellar travel require patience, at least to get beyond the initial latency.

My inner sci-fi geek tells me that by this time, we discover faster than light travel, only it isn't compatible with life as we know it.

So we ship off these receivers to circumvent that limitation. Instead of travelling ourselves, we can send off our consciousness to inhabit a human-life analog to explore.

What that does to your psyche, and your body in limbo, are probably good material for a story, if it hasn't already been written.

I think Altered Carbon had these disposable sleeves one could rent to attend a remote meeting.

My inner geek tells me it's more likely humans will plug themselves into the matrix because it'll be far more receptive to technological advances than actual exploration.

At best, you'll throw a bunch of nanoprobes everywhere to get new entropy into the system.

There was a bad sci fi movie that sort of incorporated this, The Beyond (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5723416/)

But that would still be limited by the speed of light, right?

Maybe quantum entanglement, where the original "portals" would be set up around the universe at the speed of light, but then data could henceforth be transferred between the portals at the speed of entanglement.

Of course, everything is. Doubling the speed of light means your network packets get there twice as fast, but accelerating matter to relativistic speeds, which too is limited by the speed of light, has less marginal utility from the doubling when it comes to energy needed for acceleration/deceleration and time dilation.

You're thinking of latency vs bandwidth/throughput. You might not improve on the latency part (speed of light), but you can increase the bandwidth (amount of data transferred per unit of time) just like a highway with more lanes can carry more people without increasing the individual speed of cars. You might even decrease car speed and still get an improved throughput overall.

I’m of the view that you can possibly duplicate consciousness but you can never send “me”. I’m stuck on the consciousness I’ve got. If you tried to upload my consciousness somewhere I’d still be sitting here like “hey look there’s another one of me”, but I’d not experience some shift in perspective myself.

No, you are your consciousness. The self exists only in the story the mind tells itself, so both versions would think they are the original you.

Besides, the serialisation process is a form of quantum measurement. Depending on how coarse-grained it is, there might be no way to take a snapshot without modifying you (maybe the measurement process turns the original brain matter into soup).

They would think they are the original you, but I think the GP was saying that the original perspective would continue on the original consciousness-continuity/body/hardware.

Cloning a hard drive can produce the same data, but without any networking, there's no reason for the original machine to know anything from the perspective of the new one

I hope it will be possible to digitize my brain one neuron at a time, preserving the continuity of my consciousness.

So by sleeping and breaking your consciousness stream, you die, and a new consciousness wakes up thinking it is you. With your memories and physical makeup.

I find this a scary topic, like touching a hot stove. Try as hard as I can but I can't figure out (and overall nobody has so far) how the "self" experience works.

Need to Ship of Theseus your neurons with digital equivalents. Every cell in your body is replaced within seven years, so can be a gradual digitalization.

Exactly what I was thinking. Note however that most neurons in your brain never get replaced naturally. An interesting extension of this idea is to replace one biological neuron with two digital copies, doing the same thing in parallel. Eventually two brain copies can be created with shared or duplicated consciousness.

Yeah, but you still need to get some bodies out there.

Who says we’re not doing that already and just calling it dreams?

kinda easy to disprove, just think about it for a sec.

What have you been eating before sleep? My dreams happen on Earth!

Why is it Earth and not an Earth-like planet populated by other people who are also travelling when they sleep?

What if there were 100 billion of us in total?

Well how do you know you're on earth when you wake up? What if you just pick a random earth-like planet each time, and don't realise it's a new life?

Good point. I agree

How do you know it is you who wakes up each morning and not just a new life with your memories and feelings who can't tell the difference?

Rip yesterday me.

In elementary school I read a kids' novel, called My Trip to Alpha I, that had precisely this as a McGuffin. The main character travels to visit his aunt and uncle by "Voya-Code", in which his consciousness is transmitted to an android body on the destination planet.

>will be more of a transfer of your consciousness

Sounds like a copy, not a transfer. If you didn't physically transport the atoms, the matter, you would end up with two duplicates living at different places and time, and with different ways of thinking after the copy, as the living experiences will diverge from that moment.

This unless you exterminate the original with each copy. Also should be considered each copy may lose information, degrade (signal integrity through distance, number of travels, and so on).

> unless you exterminate the original with each copy

The problem of synchronization is gonna be particularly nasty in this case.

The two generals problem suddenly gets very personal consequences.

sure, but I don't even know how to differentiate between copying my brain and being in a coma, or just falling asleep really deeply. waking up sometimes feels like enough of a discontinuity

Idk I'd say that the clone theory also applies to our every waking moment, each fraction of a second we're no longer the same person, even in the same body.

And most certainly after sleep.

How do you ensure continuity from frame of reference (observer consciousness?)

I don't know if there is true continuity. As we age our memories become memories of memories. Just as we don't see the nose between our eyes I think our brains turn a stuttered disjointed consciousness into what seems like a continuous stream.

It's like walking into a room and forgetting why you walked in there.

TCP would be fun. "Oh I missed this packet" there goes another thousand years.

When stuff like this is brought up I'm always reminded of the Stephen King short story The Jaunt[0]

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jaunt

This is one of fundamental plot elements of the Altered Carbon novels.