Comment Re:Are we our genes? (Score 1) 323
By "printing" I'm assuming they mean to duplicate the template person entirely - including memories. That tech might not exist today, and we might never be able to, but if we could, it would certainly work great for this.
Depending on the data size it might be feasible to store the templates of a few dozen individuals. Half male, half female. All the varying skillsets. Send out a few hundred probes that would systematically search star systems and if it finds an uninhabited one that could sustain human life, touch down and print/deploy/grow/whatever its digitally stored crew to colonize the planet.
The same individuals might get duplicated on quite a few planets - possibly during different time frames. IE, a probe lands, one crew builds a society, persists for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, and then finally perishes, whilst the other ones continue to search and might touch down and redeploy further duplicates of those individuals millions of years later.
Ultimately, the question of "are we alone" in the universe becomes meaningless. Is there other life elsewhere? Quite likely, but even if its NOT, life in the universe has begun - as evidenced by ourselves. Even if we're the only examples, we can spread life everywhere else.