Tommy,
I have to say I avoided reading your essay because I think moving off the planet in any serious technological fashion is delusion, for many of the reasons you list in your essay. Yet having read various of your comments on other threads, it's obvious you are an extremely intelligent person and this essay doesn't disappoint. I still think it's delusional though. Though we may be the mechanism by which elemental biology does project itself to other worlds, it isn't as an organized and recordable method.
I have to say I approach the world situation from a much more bottom up, organic process/direction and I perceive projections upward and outward as cyclical and presuming to project our current progress as to continue compounding out among the stars as overlooking a lot of the negative feedback currently built up in this system. I suppose you might pigeonhole me as a doom and gloomer, but I think there is a great deal of opportunity in this situation as well. There is a lot of energy and potential leverage in collapsing systems and as the concept of punctuated equilibrium argues, these are the best opportunities for real change. As such I think any issue of steering humanity for our generation, or the next several, would be much more planetary, than cosmic.
Personally, if the way biology functions is any lesson, life on this planet would be evolving toward being a global organism, with human civilization as its functional central nervous system. Currently though, we are simply top predator in a collapsing ecosystem and to change that will require much more introspection of who and what we are, than trying to project current methods and assumptions in a forward fashion. For one thing, there is a great deal of conceptual diversity built into the system, to where we do already function quite well as either hive minds, or individual operators, depending on circumstance. It is almost an electromagnetic function.
I think there are numerous unexamined aspects of how we function. In my own entry I point out the dichotomy of energy and information is manifest in our physiological dichotomy of an information processing central nervous system and energy processing in the digestive/respiratory systems, with the circulatory system as its delivery mechanism. This primarily to lead up to what I see as the current major fallacy in our civil functioning, ie. treating money as a commodity, rather than a contract.
There are many other aspects to physiology reflecting reality. For another, I see the two hemispheres of the brain as a thermostat(scalar) and clock(linear) processor. Primarily we like to have enough information/energy coming in to be interested, ie, not bored, but not so much as to get frustrated/angry/overheated.
So if we want to begin to peel away the layers of what it means to be alive, it isn't so much a function of simply expanding our mental processing out to ever more area, but understanding the dichotomy of awareness and knowledge. Our sense of awareness is that innate sense of self, which knowledge is the information it absorbs and manifests. You might say awareness is like an energy constantly expanding outward, while information is the form and structure it manifests and which give it shape. This sets up a conflict actually, as the sense of awareness is constantly testing and pushing the boundaries of this form, while the form tends to restrain and define it. So if you were to start packaging this sense of self into forms it can corrode and break down, it will. As the old saying goes, life is the leading cause of death.
Which all goes to say that while some of your hypotheses may be valid, in the distant future, there are significant hurtles to overcome.
Regards,
John Merryman