If warp drives actually are feasible (either sub or super liminal), that'd be great. However, it seems to me that it's much more likely we'll travel between stars as digitized minds that are recorporialized at the destination.
How do I know that I actually wake up on the other side, instead of dying and having a clone with my memories wake up instead?
Of course, this entire concept is reliant on materialism. If you believe in a soul, then I'd probably find it difficult to convince you that a digital copy of you is close enough to being you.
Something dubious about this. No one thinks they're annhiliated upon sleeping, then reconstituted upon waking.
Even adhering to materialism, the problem with mind uploads is the same problem as with teleportation: a copy is being made. Destroying the original does not mean a consciousness transfer then magically occurs from the original to the target. For mind uploads, the only plausible sounding way around this is the Moravec transfer, but even that is reliant on the Ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer.
> Even adhering to materialism, the problem...
If you don’t require continuous experience, then this issue goes away. You certainly didn’t experience living before you were conceived. My view is that consciousness is an emergent property of informational and processing structure of the brain (and possible other systems as well)—-I don’t see any physical issues with copies (other than that it might result in confusion and social problems).
And yeah, killing one of them would be murder, if they've had a chance to diverge.
And even if we do have that tech, we'd still have to be able to reach those destinations in the first place so we could establish outposts where our digitized minds could travel to. At the moment, the only way to do so is a generation ship capable of surviving the ~1000 years it would take to get to a new location with current technology.
You don't need to send a generation ship, just solar sails powered by massive laser installations that have enough tech on board to convert an asteroid into a receiver.
To be fair, 1000 years is not very long when you have digital immortality.
Anyhow, a laser propelled solar sail would make the journey to, say, alpha centuri in more like 20-40 years.
There's really not much point in slow travel if you can, instead, launch a self-replicator, wait a few decades for it to get there, and then just cast on over.