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Virtual people don't die of old age so they can go from star to star in "just" thousand years and would now span a great chunk of spiral arm. Also, since they can be copied over (can they?) they will never have to split up, they will just fork() the whole colony and say themselves goodbye.

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That doesn’t make any sense to me. I would never risk anything someone told me would move my consciousness into another machine since I would have no way to know a priori if the person on the other side would still be me. Ergo I think civilizations probably just take on the precautionary principle and maintain their minimal biological form to ensure a fully linked chain of confidence they will preserve their own consciousness, but that’s the threshold and they virtualize everything else like their incoming qualia.

Even if you do not trust their authenticity, you can still fork them to shoot into Proxima.

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