I suspect all these post-human energy-type beings will suicide purty quick from boredom.
Teh "life of the mind" is fine for some small portion of humans, but most need more. And "life of the mind" is all you'll have at that point.
I smell a conceit that those professing a post-human existence think they have the stuff to be the post-humans and not suicide in the vast subjective eternity of 3 seconds clock time.
Besides, who is going to have the physical hands to launch the beer can into space? So, we keep around a few humans to do the necessary physical manipulation...who can flip a switch and turn off the energy-type post-human energy creatures in a fit of pique. Or put them in the beer-can launcher and then get distracted by a re-run of Idiocracy while all the post-humans are trapped for a subjective eternity in the beer can and then die as the beer can's power wanes.
Yah, like how society can't function at all, with millions of people with desk jobs, after a thousand years of living/working outside.
And where is it written that being post-human means a 20th-12st century brain thrown into some sort of non-corporeal existence? Even if one was an "individual", they would more than likely be edited to tolerate it. Or just as likely, a "person" might be a hierarchy of intelligences and expert systems, just like how your knee does not get "bored" swinging your foot, or your visual cortex does not get "bored" just processing the input from your eyes all day.
For all I know, you could copy yourself, and edit the copy to have (for lack of better terms) suppressed or absent Id, Ego, and Super-Ego so it does not care that it's being sent on a mission 1000 years long or might not even come back, and the "original you" just goes to sleep to wait for your copy's return, all full of the juicy data and pretty pictures.
If such an existence is possible, we really don't have the tools to envision what it would be like, the challenge would be 1000 times harder than someone in the 1910's being tasked with describing the 2010's. But that also means we've no basis to guess that a "life of mind" would drive you to suicide, or to decide that you'd lived thousands/millions of perceived years at computer time rates etc. either.
Besides, who is going to have the physical hands to launch the beer can into space? So, we keep around a few humans to do the necessary physical manipulation...who can flip a switch and turn off the energy-type post-human energy creatures in a fit of pique. Or put them in the beer-can launcher and then get distracted by a re-run of Idiocracy while all the post-humans are trapped for a subjective eternity in the beer can and then die as the beer can's power wanes.
There's these cool things called
robots. There might be some YouTube videos of them somewhere...