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Forgetting all the movies and TV shows which portray us humans easily and effortlessly bounding between the stars, lets now look at some of the realities.
First and foremost, we are humans and humans will build and staff any vehicle we plan on to use to travel to the next home once we have killed this one. Humans make mistakes. Lots of them. Spacecraft are very complex pieces of equipment with little room for error in either design or implementation. One of the most significant achievements of us humans was the Apollo program which entailed sustained space flight for less than two weeks for three people. The CLOSEST star is 4 light years away. Say, for sake of discussion, we can perfect warp drive and move close to the speed of light. Is there any reasonable belief that we can actually make a spacecraft possible of warp travel that would safely provide a habitable environment, not experience any structural or electrical failures for the dozens (hundreds?) of brave people that would be colonizing the next world for a period of years? Factor in the requirements of finding a habitable planet that natively has narrow temperature fluctuations, abundant water and an oxygen source and the search for that habitable planet becomes much, much broader (read: farther away). One thing that must be considered is that we have no clue whatsoever on how to create sustained warp travel (if it is even possible) nor do we have the slightest clue what is inside a wormhole (if they exist) and what engineering would be required to make safe travel through a wormhole possible
No, we need to come to grips with the reality that life on Earth will end and the full extent of our legacy will be Voyager. Best case is the sun goes nova/red dwarf in 5 billion years. Earth, Moon, Tesla spacecraft and most of the planets are fried in the process. The reality is the Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way galaxy in about 4 billion years. It is postulated that there is so much empty space in a galaxy that this could happen and we would not even know it other than some celestial pyrotechnics as the super massive black holes at the center of the two galaxy's collide. As we are not that far from the center of the Milky Way, I find it hard to believe we would not be affected in that collision (and resultant ginormous explosion) this would create.
I, for one, am comfortable with that. Our existence on Earth is built on the remnants of multiple nova, supernova and rotating binary star supernovas events. We are the leftovers from whatever stars, planets, life, civilizations that were cooked in the process. The least we could do is give back the dust so something else has a chance.
Just my opinion.
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gary
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