Re: Shorely we wouldn't coast all the way?
That's why you want to send copies ... many, many copies! (Preceded by dense clouds of dust to clean up anything that can be cleaned up, I would imagine)
Waiting to be cloned one thousand times and scattered across ten million cubic light-years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked with gold. (…) As the moment of diaspora approached, a small gray lizard darted across the courtyard, claws scrabbling. It halted by the far edge of the pool, and Paolo marveled at the delicate pulse of its breathing, and watched the lizard watching him, until it moved again, disappearing into the surrounding vineyards. (…) No one had asked the lizards if they wanted to be cloned, though. They were coming along for the ride, like it or not.
The sky above the courtyard was warm and blue, cloudless and sunless, isotropic. Paolo waited calmly, prepared for every one of half a dozen possible fates.
An invisible bell chimed softly, three times. Paolo laughed, delighted.
One chime would have meant that he was still on Earth: an anti-climax, certainly - but there would have been advantages to compensate for that. Everyone who really mattered to him lived in the Carter-Zimmerman polis, but not all of them had chosen to take part in the diaspora to the same degree; his Earth-self would have lost no one. (…)
Two chimes would have meant that this clone of Carter-Zimmerman had reached a planetary system devoid of life. Paolo had run a sophisticated but non-sapient self-predictive model before deciding to wake under those conditions. (...) Four chimes would have signaled the discovery of intelligent aliens. Five, a technological civilization. Six, spacefarers.
Three chimes, though, meant that the scout probes had detected unambiguous signs of life - and that was reason enough for jubilation. Up until the moment of the pre-launch cloning - a subjective instant before the chimes had sounded - no reports of alien life had ever reached Earth. There'd been no guarantee that any part of the diaspora would find it....
(From: "Wang’s Carpets" by Greg Egan. Published 1995 in “New Legends”, edited by Greg Bear and Martin H. Greenberg. A modified version of this story appears in Greg Egan's Novel “Diaspora”, 1998)