starwisp

Or we might do the upload/starwisp thing Stross explores in Accelerando.

A Month of Writers, Day Two: Charles Stross « Whatever 2007

But I suspect some combination of these technologies will show up sooner or later - barring resource-depletion crashes and/or habitable-biosphere-envelope departures on a planetary scale - and once you've got two out of the three, a starwisp-driven expansion starts to look feasible (if energetically expensive). what I was talking about earlier.

Ethical Technology 2009

Finally, if we can do the upload thing well enough to provide the brains to run our starwisp in the first place, we can probably make do without building a biosphere at the other end.

Ethical Technology 2009

In particular, it's a lot cheaper than travelling in person (and anyway, we've got the honking great big solar power station/maser grid we built to launch the starwisp in the first place; might as well put it to use).

Ethical Technology 2009

I expect it'd only happen in the wake of our development of stable, safe space habitats - itself a huge obstacle (Just look at the history of our first modular space station if you want to get an idea of the problems surrounding life in space) - and if the energy costs required to launch a starwisp are high (56Gw for about a month to punch a

Ethical Technology 2009