>we are only aware of one species that developed civilization building capabilities.
well, the first one just doesn't leave any chance for any other one.
>Life might be very common, but intelligent life still be incrediblY rare.
the time period between big ape and nuclear bomb is extremely short - few millions years. In a hundred or a thousand - doesn't really matter - years we'll be an interstellar species or may be we destroy ourselves by Covid-2319. The point is that complexity develops exponentially and tremendous changes are happening in an extremely a short period of time - i.e. if life has 4B years to develop when it most probably has 4.01B years to develop civilization.
Unlikely we will ever be interstellar. The technology involved is speculative and the physics barriers needed to be surpassed are impossible and not well understood.
To reach another star by the laws of physics involves many human lifetimes and that’s just the nearest star.
That in itself makes it more likely that we will never be interstellar.
Slow but plausible starships can be designed with 1960s technology. The obstacle is not the technology but the scale of the effort, a problem that could be solved by extension of civilization into the solar system with much larger populations.
https://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109.jvn.spring00/n...
Humanity will never put effort into this. We don’t have the technology yet but yes we can develop it but doing this is harder than building a bridge across the ocean between Asia and the US.
That bridge is also within our technological capacity. But it’s not happening period.
That depends on the scale of human society, doesn't it? Grow the population in the solar system enough and it becomes a smaller fraction of gross output than many trivial and frivolous things are today.
I'm arguing here that if non-interstellar space colonization is possible, interstellar colonization is a natural and feasible extension. You might argue that even colonization in the solar system will not occur, and I admit that's a defensible position.
"Roundtrip Interstellar Travel Using Laser-Pushed Lightsails"
https://ia800108.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/24...
We can disperse intelligent machines. Possibly with the ability to regenerate biological life.
>The technology involved is speculative and the physics barriers needed to be surpassed are impossible and not well understood.
we can build with today's tech - classic nuclear reactor plus ion drive - a 3 stage ship reaching 1000km/s, 1200 years to the closest star. Once we get to fusion, we'll be able to improve that speed a small order of magnitude.
>To reach another star by the laws of physics involves many human lifetimes and that’s just the nearest star. >That in itself makes it more likely that we will never be interstellar.
That is exactly what makes it _inter_stellar:) We'll have generations - 10-15 to the nearest star with the current tech mentioned above - of people living their lives on those ships. Living on a planet will become a strange thing for them.
I think in 10-20 years, once launching into LEO becomes cheap with Starship, companies, universities and wealthy individuals will be launching solar + ion drive and nuclear + ion to all the places in the Solar System and some automated probes - beyond.