If the human race based it’s endeavors on avoiding risk we would still be sitting in caves staring at fire. And the benefits of exploration are often not something planned, but the result of new and unexpected discoveries. Conquering space is just another stepping stone mankind will achieve in it’s desire to satisfy our seemingly endless curiosity. Assuming we don’t get hit by an asteroid first.
Does a fuel even exist that could power just itself to the speed of c, nevermind an engine and payload.
Well, no. To accelerate a mass – any mass – to the speed of light requires an infinite amount of energy.
Fuels definitely do exist that could accelerate a spaceship to some fraction of the speed of light. The “launching laser” model allows the ship to be independent of fuel tanks. The matter is within current theoretical limits of engineering.
It seems fallacious to declare “It will never happen.” How can anyone know that? Such declarations in the past have tended to run afoul of technological advances. Who knows what science might discover in the next century or two?
Not without a breakthrough in fundamental physics. Given that happening, however, I’d say we’d be launching our first probes within 100 years… it’d just be too tempting not to.
Von Neumann machines, on the other hand - that I can see, easily, and without much more advanced technology than what we have today. It wouldn’t be “us” per se, but probably as close as we’ll ever get.
We could possibly migrate outwards and end up around other stars, based on quite a few assumptions. First we’d have to learn to utilize asteroids and comets to build self-sufficient orbiting colonies. That sounds expensive now but if the Earth gets more and more crowded people might find it cheaper to build land area in space than spend a million dollars per square foot on Earth. If asteroids and comets can provide sufficient resources, sooner or later someone will build a colony out in the asteroid belt. Once we’re out that far, we’d probably not need the sun for energy so really what would stop us from simply heading further out? I believe there are more asteroids and comets outwards than inwards towards the sun. I used to think we wouldn’t get past Neptune, but we’re learning more about the Oort Cloud, and it looks like there’s plenty of material out there. There’s almost certainly pluto-like planetoids out there and even some conjecture there could be a super earth way out there. That planet could have lots of moons, etc. The outer portion of the Oort Cloud may extend over half the way to the nearest star. If nearby stars also have Oort Clouds overlapping our own, eventually we’d end up in a new solar system.
Lots of ifs, and it could take 100’s of thousands of years or more, but as long as humanity can build more land and make more babies it would be natural for whatever our species is like that far in future.
Heck, there could be alien civilizations already living in our Oort Cloud. We’d never know if they didn’t deliberately try to contact us.
Prediction for the year 10000: In the year 9999, the world will be in a state of hysterical crisis as we desperately try to resurrect cryogenically frozen COBOL programmers from 1999 to fix all the world’s Y10K bugs.
Ye canna change the laws of physics
Laws of physics
Laws of physics…
(Only half serious; I just HAD to use that line. :))
ETA: Oh, yeah, and we’re all dead from global warming anyway. 
True, but if the future was based on dreamy optimism, our stay-at-home wives would all be cooking using atomic ovens right now.
Definitely not. Even if we should manage to colonize other systems, this kind of civilization is impossible without some form of FTL travel(or at least FTL communication) which I think will remain physically impossible.
It might happen with the solar system. Never the galaxy. Not by us.
I’m with those who say it might be done by our Inheritor machines. Maybe.
Nope. With sufficiently advanced technology that includes a power source, none of that is necessary. Nanotech builders could take care of all repairs and replacement parts. Hell, we’re a small step towards creating replacement parts without manufacturing facilities already with just 3D printers.
And there’s oxygen in interstellar space to take care of oxygen loss (which is not inevitable, FYI). And if we really want to go advanced tech, any element we want can be created via nuclear transmutation.
On a marginally related note, a novel was just published that takes place in an galactic empire that does not have FTL travel.
Lockstep by Karl Schroeder
For long-term survival, a breeding population must be large/diverse enough to reliably produce healthy offspring. If the starting population is too small, or lacks genetic diversity, then inbreeding results in health problems. This has been a problem for (for example) cheetahs and the Amish: the former is believed to have suffered a population bottleneck at some time in the past, and the latter are mostly descended from a very small group of original Amish, and tend not to intermarry with non-Amish.
Bottom line? there’s not enough resources available (including money) to send a large enough group of people off the earth to be genetically viable. If you want to survive a decades- (or centuries-) long journey through deep space, you need to have a breeding population together on one ship. A shot in the dark here, I’d guess that needs to be thousands of individuals.
The International Space Station reportedly cost $150B, and can handle a crew of six. All it does is orbit the earth. The resources required to build a vessel capable of housing thousands of fully formed human beings AND leaving earth orbit to travel at useful interplanetary or interstellar speeds would be orders of magntitude greater than this. It would be an enormous ship, with equally enormous engines and a shitload of fuel.
The previous paragraph offers an interesting clue, though. We need not send fully-formed human beings. The human genome reportedly comprises about 750 megabytes of information; IOW, a 1-TB flash drive can hold the blueprints to build 1333 people. Storing a genome in this way (instead of in a living, breathing human being) is also a sort of long-term suspended animation: a flash drive uses much fewer resources than a human being, so the ship can be sent on its way with less food/air/water, and it can also take its sweet time getting to its destination. Building a spaceship that can hold a few thousand flash drives and takes centures to get anywhere is a much more manageable proposition - but of course the challenge then, upon arriving at a hospitable destination, is how to use that information to recreate fully-formed human beings with the survival wisdom normally acquired through decades of experience, education, and socialization. I don’t know how we’ll do that, but I’m confident that we won’t be sending breeding populations of fully-formed human beings into space.
Me too, but most everybody’s thinking too 21st century here.
I can imagine sentient or semi-sentient machines in vessles carying instructions to colonize some earth-like exoplanet by growing humans using some breakthrough in biological engineering.
Even if starting from molecularly printing DNA to cloning embryos, they could be raised by sentient androids and schooled on the mission(s) to colonize.
If within 10 to 30 LYs of any star, humanity could conceivably leapfrog from star to star this way over centuries/millennia.
Since I’m one of the board’s resident skeptics with respect to manned space travel, this may seem odd coming from me.
But I believe it will happen. Not in the next century, certainly, but eventually.
Why?
First thing: FTL isn’t necessary. What you need for your generation ship are: travel at a pretty good fraction of the speed of light, and suspended animation. And human suspended animation is about to become a real thing, albeit for periods lasting only hours, not decades.
It just seems improbable to me that, sometime in the next 500 years, we won’t figure out how to meet both of those challenges - (1) being able to boost a spacecraft up to, say, 0.5c, and (2) keep people in suspended animation for decades, then safely revive them.
Once we meet challenge #1, we can send out robotic craft to explore likely planets around stars in our general neighborhood. It may take a century or two to for one of our probes to find a more or less human-habitable planet and send the word back, but after that we can get several hundred volunteers, diverse in both genetics and skills, for the generation ship, stock it with what they need to replicate 19th century technology and agriculture where they’re going, plus a library to help guide them up the ladder to more modern technology a bit faster than we originally managed. Then put the volunteers on board, put them under, and set the alarm to go off when they are a few months out from their new home.
Not that I’ll be around to be surprised, but if I were, I’d be surprised if we didn’t manage to colonize a planet around another star by 3000 AD.
I think it probably won’t happen. First, because there’s no compelling reason to leave the solar system for many tens of millions of years – here we have abundant resources and effectively unlimited energy, and numerous worlds to attempt terraforming should it come to that. Second, because I suspect the FLT speed limit isn’t going to change, and that no quantum anomalies that might seem to allow it would ever be suitable for transporting living beings, but rather only information. In a nutshell, I don’t see it ever being practical or feasible to colonize other star systems with people.
I have some strong hope that sending probes would be feasible.
But “ever” is a dangerous word. Who knows what the future will bring?
I believe it’s the guided destiny of humanity to travel the stars and join a interstellar community.
Even if we don’t have FTL, we won’t need suspended animation, or ultra-long lifespans. We just need smart robots that can last a long time, artificial wombs, genetic material, and patience. Here’s how we do it:
Find a possible planet in another solar system. Collect spores/eggs/DNA/etc from all the forms of life we want on a new planet. Build the spaceship (with smart robots), with freezers that can store that material for the trip. It doesn’t have to be fast – the trip can take thousands of years, as long as the robots and freezers will last. When the spaceship arrives, the seed robots take over – first they seed the planet with the bacterial spores/etc to get a biosphere going. This may take decades, or hundreds/thousands of years. When the time is right (and the robots will have to be very smart!), they will steadily introduce the spores/seeds/eggs of the plant and animal life we want. The whole process will probably take thousands of years. Life that requires “mothering” (like most mammals and birds) will have to be cloned/hatched and taken care of by surrogate robot mothers.
The final step, once we have a nice biosphere with plants and animals, is to unfreeze the human fertilized eggs/embryos and incubate them in artificial wombs. The first generation of humans will be raised by surrogate robot mothers. This will undoubtedly create all kinds of new and fascinating psychoses for our previously-frozen settlers.
But there will be humans there. And if the solar system is within a few dozen light-years, we could even communicate with them (once they are “born”) and get a response within a human lifetime.
My plan in the above post would require people to dedicate significant resources with an extremely long-term view in mind. But the spaceship wouldn’t have to be huge (only big enough to store the robots and the countless seeds/spores/eggs/etc needed), and it wouldn’t have to be hugely fast, so a very affluent Earth-solar-system human civilization might very well choose to do it.
I think what will happen is that Richard Branson will develop a lineage of clones. Whatever number of clone happens to be around when Richard* develops near-c speeds and comparable slowing of ageing, Richard* will fund his own mission to the nearest habitable planet, which he has been communicating with.
But the advantage of small ships is that they can go faster. Rather than one large, slow ship, we could send a million tiny but very fast ships each with a few components that could self-assemble themselves into larger more sophisticated things, and those things could then build earth-like habitats and seed them with life.
We have no idea if we can build anything complex that will survive a million-year journey through the radioactive hellstorm of space, but we probably could build small reasonably complex things that could survive a fast 100-year journey. Or maybe even just a 30-year journey.