The other day I saw a lecture on space travel technology. The speaker was talking about how fast various kinds of propulsion systems (existing and potentially possible within the next 30-50 years) could get a vessel going, and how long that vessel would take to get to the nearby stars.
That got me thinking about the problems of sending humans any significant distance through space (well, that and playing some Kerbal Space Program). Basically, interstellar travel is going to be the domain of robots and seeds, since sending a self-supporting (and repairing!) biome for multiple generations of humans requires a fantastic amount of mass.
And then, what would the people sending the robots want them to do? As others have pointed out, so far we’ve essentially been sending out dick pics and plaques saying, “Come over to my place!”
And now I’m concerned that some bright spark is going to think, “Oh, I know, the best way to introduce humanity to the universe is to embed Chat GPT in our outbound robots.” Because why not unleash SimFratBoy — what could possibly go wrong?