Ad Astra
Traveling to the moon is so last century. Mars is small dusty ball with little of interest. The rest of the Solar System is either very, very hot or very, very cold. Where is an enterprising space traveler to set his sights? The stars, of course. Interstellar travel is widely considered to be impossible, or at the very least prohibitively difficult. That hasn't stopped a group of scientists, engineers and dreamers from forming the Tau Zero Foundation, whose purpose is to lay the groundwork for practical starflight.
I'm all for that. The group is in its infancy, as yet. Yet having someone out there, pushing for the development of the technologies that could get us out of this rural backwater and into the big cities of the galaxy, is a good thing. Unless, of course, Greg Benford and Charles Pellegrino and not Carl Sagan are right about how dangerous the rest of the galaxy might be. And that really is the big thing. I am not saying that we shouldn't head out into the big galaxy - we should. Earth is the cradle of mankind, and we can't stay in the cradle forever. And if Earth is the cradle, the Solar System is the nursery. We don't know, yet, whether the universe outside the nursery is a barren desert, a civilised utopia, or a particularly savage part of the Bronx after sundown. Given the fecundity of life on earth, and the size of the galaxy, I think the barren desert is unlikely. There will be life, somewhere. Probably manywheres. If some of that life is sentient, the chances of a enlightened utopia is vanishingly small. Perhaps we, or some other race, might unify and be nice. All of them? At the same time? It only takes one to ruin the party, and someone is going to be nasty. When the outcome of an interstellar war could be species extinction, how many races will take a chance on being nice?
I don't think we will draw much attention to ourselves expanding into the solar system. Whatever technology we end up using to travel starward, we will likely need the resources of the solar system to accomplish the journey - massive solar power stations harvesting the energy of the sun to create antimatter, or perhaps something even more odd. When we head out, though - that's different. We will not only draw attention to ourselves, we will have proved that we have the capability of wreaking havoc on anyone in our neighborhood. A relativistic spaceship is indistinguishable from a relativistic bomber.
We're not there yet. But technology isn't just increasing. It isn't even accelerating. The rate of acceleration is increasing. We might be there quicker than even the most optimistic appraisals allow for, even not counting the singularity. It seems funny to talk of interstellar travel when we can barely get into orbit, but we went from not even being able to fly to walking on the moon in 66 years. Once we're in space, the expansion could be quite quick indeed.
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And I'll add a thought to
And I'll add a thought to your final paragraph.
We did indeed go from a vibrant buggy-whip economy to a polymer-n-plastics economy in a single lifepans. A relatively brief lifespan, at that.
But ever since Apollo, it seems we've largely been marking time. Who knows wht our species may have achieved had we stuck with applying science- in materials tech, computing, et al- toward actual star travel instead of...of...whatever it is we've been doing since.
I mean yeah, rovers and orbiters collect terrific data, but...look, a remote controlled Martian toaster is not half as cool as the interplanetary system ships we COULD have had by now.
But, as you've said, with the rate of acceleration increasing, maybe we can catch up to where we ought to be in a timely fashion.
It would indeed be nice, but
It would indeed be nice, but the problems that are left -- at least as far as establishing and maintaining a self-sustaining colony of human beings outside of Earth's atmosphere -- are big ones. Not only can we not even establish a self-sustaning but isolated colony here (Biosphere? Biosphere 2? It is to laugh), but there are extremely difficult medical problems related to long-term space travel. Discover, I believe, had a big story on that not too long ago.
Think about the logistical problems that ensue just with, say, keeping researchers in the Antarctic. Now think about the same problems x10,000 on Mars. "Earth is the cradle of mankind, and we can’t stay in the cradle forever" is a great mission statement, but one that fails to the extent that at no time, generally, is the cradle surrounded by airless vacuum, nor is the rest of the house, or even the nursery, comprised of unliveable terrain with no (or poisonous) atmosphere, temperatures outside the habitable range, deadly radiation and no exploitable water or vegetation.
I hope fervently that this happens within my lifetime. Which I plan to be about 200 years what with life-sustaining medications and treatments and whatnot. Still, sometimes it's easy to be pessimistic about it.
My cradle was surrounded by
My cradle was surrounded by airless vacuum...
Sure, there are problems. I
Sure, there are problems. I am preversely both optimistic and pessimistic when it comes to this sort of thing. I am most pessimistic when it comes to NASA, the bureaucracy that has presided over thirty years of inactivity, spacewise.
However, most of the big problems that you cite are not, at root, insoluble. Engineering problems, rather than need for breakthrough research. Once we are able to get into space for a reasonable amount of money - less than a billion dollars a launch, for starters - these problems can be solved, by research in orbit.
I'm not saying
1) get into space
2) ???
3) profit!
But low cost access to space will make many things possible. Also, in space, you have advantages that Antarctica and the biosphere didn't. Unlimited solar power, ease of construction thanks to freefall (inflatable habs, etc.) and, eventually, a real motivation to make it work whether that motivation is tourism (can't have zero-g sex with penguins) or asteroid mining or research or whatever.
Once the basic problem of a moderately closed life support system is solved, things can take off big time. And, happily, we don't have to come up with that first, we can go into space and invent it.
Reliable heavy-lift
Reliable heavy-lift capability is a first step. The Space Elevator would be a great project to fund - maybe more important than the Panama Canal was.
Once we can put heavy stuff in space and bring other heavy stuff back, the rest will be relatively easy.