But what about the bit about not hitting anything whilst travelling at that speed? Even a speck of space dust would do massive damage at those speeds, right?

Wait so the only thing limiting our interstellar travel is money? That's awesome!!!

I think most of us would like the possibility that WE can travel between the stars, not some incredibly disconnected OTHER.

For example, I would like to see Niagara Falls, not send someone there that I’ll never ever connect with again.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuude

Read the “How It Unfolds” short story by James S. A. Corey, it is identical to your ideas.

We already have a lot of biotech and even some biocomputers. The main issue is that bio structures are fragile for our common use cases.

We also have self replicating machines, 3D printers for example. They are as much as alive as viruses as both require some input from the hosts for full replication cycle. It's just that most people don't think about 3D printers as alive and self replicating beings.

You're not the only one, but nobody is interested in giving any of you an all-expenses-paid trip to deep space.

Where would you go, and what could one ship's crew do there?

I guess there's a place to be conserned that eventually a society might emerge within the genealogical ship that might cause them to loose their allegiance to the rest of humanity and go their seperate way. We saw this when european colonists came to the new world, they didn't stay loyal to their home governements because of the difficulty to communicate across the ocean and the difficulty the home government would experience projecting their authority. Communication would be just as difficult with a genealogical ship and they might leave us forever, like we'll never see any benefits from the genealogical ship.

And when you think about it that would make the most sense, because even when the final decendants of the genealogical ship find a new home world they'll never come back to earth, their will be no travel. That world would become a different world for people who might not even consider themselves as human.

Conclusion: there's no way to space travel unless a person can travel between worlds and still have enough of their lifespans ahead of themselves to do stuff to contribute to the wider galactic human soceity. Unless you want to live in the cowboy bebop world where the government is too weak to do anything so they have to hire bounty hunters to suppress ~~criminal organizations~~ competing governments, and you don't know who has your better intrest and who's going to protect you from who, be my guest, fracture human soceity before we're truly ready to go out into space. It sure worked out well 100 years ago.