The dream of interstellar travel is shackled by biology. Humans are fragile, needy, and impatient. The distances are inhuman. So we send something else: a World Model Avatar. We don't send a ship with people. We send a ship containing a powerful AI and a high-fidelity World Model of Earth, its culture, its knowledge, and its people. Upon arrival at a new star system, the probe awakens and uses local resources to build infrastructure. Then, it runs the simulation.It doesn't beam back pictures. It beams back a simulated experience. It uses its sensors to build a world model of the alien planet, then merges it with the Earth model it carries. On Earth, we don VR rigs and 'step into' the simulation. We walk on an alien world, not as a grainy 360-video, but as a fully simulated, physically consistent, interactive reality. We feel its wind (simulated), examine its rocks (modelled down to the molecular level), and encounter its potential life forms (reconstructed by the probe's AI).The probe is a seed of consciousness. It's a backup of human curiosity, encoded in silicon. It can wait ten thousand years in silence. It can take centuries to decelerate. It is patient in a way flesh can never be. And it can create a bridge of presence that is, for all experiential purposes, faster than light. The moment the probe's simulation is stable, we are there.This changes the goal of SETI. We're not just listening. We're preparing compatible world model packets—a lingua franca of reality simulation that we could send, or receive, to exchange not messages, but entire shareable experiences. A greeting from aliens wouldn't be a radio signal; it would be a .worldmodel file containing a tour of their home.My controversial take is this: This is how intelligence truly spreads across the galaxy—not in generation ships, but as consciousness kernels. The great filter isn't the difficulty of biological travel, but the moment a civilization realizes it can outsource its curiosity and presence to immortal, digital proxies. The galaxy may already be teeming with these silent probes, each a tomb for a biological species that transcended its body, and a cradle for its simulated spirit, endlessly exploring the cosmos from within a perfect, portable dream of home.This has been The World Model Podcast. We don't just dream of the stars—we engineer the dreams that will travel to them. Subscribe now.