All the ones driven by the desire to escape a nation or religion.
And why does “sustained” matter?
Liberia?
That’s not called “colonization.” That’s called “fleeing,” or if you prefer, “migration.” I don’t see how interstellar population migration would ever be a viable prospect, unless men with money had already paved a road to the stars for the migrants to travel on.
If the massive expenditures of money, engineering and time going into a “generation ship” can’t be characterized as a sustained effort, then I don’t think anything else can either.
Granted, though from what I read of it, it seems the founders (and funders) of Liberia had mixed motives including good old fashioned imperialism. At the very least, though, I think the Southerners wanting to deport inconvenient freedmen had an interest in preserving their society and the material wealth it gave them, even if gaining wealth wasn’t the ostensible motive.
Mr and Mrs Brian Norris of 37, Gledhill Gardens, Parsons Green?
I voted option 2 because I am an optimist at heart.
I know a fair bit about physics and everything I know says that FTL is not possible.
However, I am an ignorant hairless ape, limited by this knowledge.
Who knows what we will find when the next generation of space telescopes come online?
If we find a viable Earth-like planet within a few hundred light years, we will almost certainly send a probe there.
If we eventually come up with a method of uploading our minds into non-biological matrices, then those entities will be ‘human’ and will reach that planet.
But then again, if we become non-biological, why would we limit ourselves to Earth-like planets.
Of course, all of this is predicated upon the results of the coming mid-term elections in the USA, so I probably should have waited until mid-November to reply.
I voted “No, because we will evolve culturally to the point where we need no such silly fantasies” but think that it will be more devolve than evolve. The modern mass consumption society will deplete resources so much and/or cause such environmental disruption in the next few centuries that I believe mankind is more likely to become pastoral by necessity than high tech in the far future. Either that or "No, but not because of physics or engineering limitations; we’ll exterminate ourselves".
Nope, our technologies will never evolve anywhere near what would be required to travel those distances within a time frome tolerable by the human body. Our efforts would be better spent trying to preserve the life sustaining characteristics of this planet than pursuing the notion we’ll find a better world elsewhere with which we could engineer ourselves the opportunity to just start over.
I don’t buy this at all; if we have the tech to move large numbers of people interstellar distances when the sun dies, we have the tech to ignore the sun going out as a minor inconvenience.
Like Gagundathar, I voted for option 2 out of sheer optimism.
It’s a big universe. Seems a shame to waste all that space. I hope that we’ll be able to find our away around the universe’s speed limit (whether through wormholes, something like an Alcubierre drive, or who knows what else I can’t conceive of) or, failing that, send slow ships with humans or post-humans, in stasis and/or uploaded.
Unfortunately, I’d bet it won’t happen in my lifetime.
I think it more likely that, when Sol dies, whatever sapient species still remains on Earth will not be anything we’d recognize as human, or that would feel any more commonality with us than we do with tribosphenidans.
Yes, this seems like a strange option to leave out of the poll.
At any rate, as others have said, I think most of the “Yes” proponents are simply handwaving away the difficulties. Even getting a ship close to c, a ship that can support a human crew, would require absurd amounts of energy, more than a fusion plant can generate.
The only ways we’ll do this are 1.) if we find new physics to work around the speed of light and other physical problems and 2.) if we evolve into a post human synthetic creature that can stand million year trips and require few resources to live.
I was thinking that POV was captured by the FTL is impossible option, but I see you think it wasn’t. Do I take it that you think that Even generation ships will never be able to do it should have been included?
I would have voted for that option among the available choices if it were available (I’m slightly more optimistic than that, but only slightly).
The sun won’t die for billions of years. We haven’t even had multicellular life for that long. Even if the natural selection is slower to produce change in humans (we shrug off selection pressures that would have profound impacts on other animals), it seems hard to believe that homo sapiens sapiens will still be extant at that point. I doubt we’ll drive ourselves to extinction, but the normal processes of natural selection and speciation will eventually create sufficient changes that whatever animals are walking around are not human in any meaningful sense - and I don’t feel any particular obligation to nonhumans. If they don’t want to go extinct when the Sun expands into a red giant, well, they can invest in their own space program. 
You’ve hit on an important point, though - the end of the Sun is pretty much the only thing that could justify interstellar travel. Even interplanetary travel is a hard sell - the very least hospitable places on Earth are far, far more habitable than the nicest places on Mars, for example. But even if you wanted to go to space for, say, asteroid mining - we’ve got plenty of asteroids right in our own system.
We might send probes to other stars, some day - slower-than-light probes, of course. And I think that would be worth doing. But interstellar travel is a deeply foolish idea.
Skald, if you insist on beating me to my point (and stating it more concisely than I, to boot), I’ll have to insist on dispatching my own bees to your office.
Yeppers.
I should also add, by the way, that even the Sun’s eventual expansion into a red giant could be dealt with, in principle, by the colonization of other planets, comets, or asteroids within the solar system, or through the construction of habitats in space. You’d still have access to (frozen) water and oxygen, without all the wildly, fantastically impractical mucking about in interstellar space. The sun’s eventual explosion as a nova might be survivable as well, in shielded habitats within the solar system. And once you survive that, it’s relatively straightforward to move your habitats or whatever closer to the surviving white dwarf - it may not be undergoing fusion, but it’s very hot and will stay that way for a good long time: billions of years.
In short, whoever’s living on Earth when the Sun starts to die will need a very good interplanetary space program if they want to survive - but it’s unlikely they’d need interstellar travel.
This is a good summation, with the point that traveling immense distances is not needed. The red giant phase probably will happen in the space of 3-5,000,000,000,000 yrs.- Earth will be carbon and silicon way before that; and we will have evolved into some unrecognizable form, with more smarts than we have now, and left. The time scales are impossible to imagine, never mind the distances.
Me too. I think many people who think we can do it are underestimating the magnitude of the task. We have trouble building machines to last a decade.