[antepodius]

In the end, the geometry does imply that for a given reproduction rate, you eventually reach a crunch where there's not enough surface area of new space to expand to for your colonists, who are proportional to your volume. Being uploads speeds up your rate of expansion, because you could send out seedships much nearer to c and then beam over the digital colonists to be picked up by the infrastructure built at the new system- but digitised people could also reproduce much, much faster than biologicals.