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/)