I'd say machines will be cheaper.
11 years at light speed would still be 100s, 1000s of years at speeds obtainable by humans. Building a ship capable of that kind of life support is just beyond capabilities. A ship of that size is not getting off the ground. Our current manufacturing capabilities outside of the gravity well is assembling modules together or maybe a 3D printer
It will take a concerted effort by our species. Just as you go on to say that solving aging would require multinational support, why would you limit interstellar travel to a single nation?
The fastest way for us to become space voyagers would be for us to receive that signal from somewhere near Vega that tells us how to build the machine to take us places.
Right now the voyager is traveling at 17 km/s which is 0.0056% of the speed of light. We don't have the propulsion technology and given the known laws of nature, it's unlikely we will ever have something feasible to travel at 10% of light speed. But even if we did manage that we'd be looking at 100 years of travel for a one-way trip.
Payloads would be measured in grams, though. That's what Breakthrough Starshot [1] is all about. Given suitable infrastructure (e.g. lasers stationed across the solar system), even 1/3 c is possible for machines.
Crewed missions would be seriously limited given near future technologies - the craft would simply be too heavy for using solar sails and even nuclear thermal propulsion only gets to a tiny fraction of c.
Also keep in mind that you need to slow down at the target, too, if your mission is crewed as fly-bys like Breakthrough Starshot aren't desiderable for crewed missions.
The cold hard truth is that your ΔV = 9.8 * ISP * ln(MR), where MR is the mass-ratio and MR = (Mass[Propellant] + Mass[Spacecraft]) / Mass[Spacecraft].
ISP and MR for known near-term propulsion systems are as follows:
• Chemical rockets: ISP <500s MR ~10 => ΔV < 11 km/s
• Ion engines: ISP <5000s MR ~2 => ΔV < 34km/s
• Nuclear Thermal rockets: ISP <15000s MR ~2 => ΔV < 102 km/s
• Multi-stage ion engines: ISP <25000s MR ~2 => ΔV < 170 km/s
So basically the fasted currently known option that doesn't straight up use nukes + pusher plate can get you to 0.5% c give or take.
How about sending a whole village for the voyage? Some will die, some will be born, culture will be thought and the next generation would colonise the new planet.
They could operate mining facilities on these planets and live to see the profits of a big mineral haul back to earth.
Have a few cuddly dogs aboard too so that the first generation doesn't grow up completely devoid of affection by only talking to machines
In this case you have to fully automate healthcare and education. Then you still have to steer these individuals towards some sort of economic goal because presumably you are not just sending kids to a foreign planet for fun.
It may take a very long time to get there though, but I don't see any reason why people would stop funding progress towards this goal.
Compared to that, what investment is going towards automating childcare, education and healthcare today?
It has no bering on making us live forever, and I am willing to bet that 'curing' aging for good is impossible unless we figure out brain uploading, which could be impossible and opens a new can of worms - is the new copy actually you?
By contrast we are making a massive investment to automate more or less everything, for instance advances in robotics and machine vision clearly help to automate both healthcare and car assembly.
Taking out of the map colonization, and trying a very long term (decades, or centuries) plan to send something like the Voyager or even the Mars Explorer just to learn what is there is more realistic. And once we know more decide what are the next realistic steps. But think in hundreds or thousands of years if everything gets right.
In our current stage it would be easier (not easy) to colonize Venus, the moon or the asteroid belt, and could have a more realistic time frame.
For example, the longest timeframe in pension fund investing is 25 years. Which is 1/3th of a lifetime.
If lifetimes increase by 10x then the timeframe would become 250 years and mineral explorations of other solar systems becomes a feasible financial endeavor.
You have to have a large space industry, mining and construction, to be able to build large ships and send autonomous drones, supllies, etc. You would do that ahead of any colonists actually arriving.
Of course... this was to avoid an extinction-level event, is assumed to have failed on 95/100 attempts, and was even in-universe acknowledged to just be the best of a number of catastrophically bad options.
But, a sorta-kinda solution.
There have been many isolated communities and if they die, thats because they succumb to diseasse or disaster.
Also, all these historical examples occur in the context of having millions of acres to roam, probably access to a lake or ocean, sunshine, fruits, seeing other animals, and so on (the natural habitat of humans). Even in prison they get yard time, and prisons are extremely violent.
The number of generations it would take to travel ### lightyears away is so high that _something_ is just bound to happen. What if one of the generations gets hooked on bath salts? What if they get irradiated and lose fertility? What if they start a cult? What if there's a lone wolf killer who takes them all out?
My understanding is that acceleration gets exponentially more expensive at higher speeds making it practically unfeasible to build a ship like this
Asymptotically approaching infinity as you approach light speed, not merely exponential.
Since when is this possible? Did I miss something?
Although at this point you (=the AI) would lose 11 years transmitting yourself, you won't actually be conscious of this process.
Suppose you have a real AI inhabiting a robot here on earth, it would only require to copy the AI, transmit it and boot up the AI on compatible robotics hardware on the new planet.
This would be the equivalent of transporting your brain into a cloned body.