@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:You're unlikely to get that kind of probe (resembling the Martian rovers) because interstellar distances are too great. Twenty or more light years out, and, given our current technology, you'd need an enormous expenditure to get a probe out there in anything under about 30 years--then 20 years for the data to come back. I don't see, in our present geo-political state, anyone making that kind of expenditure, nor anyone planning that far down the road.
I would love to think that we did that, even though i'd not live long enough to see any results. But i'm pessimistic about that sort of thing because human history shows us to be usually short-sighted and selfish.
One of my prime objection to the so-called Fermi paradox is that he didn't, apparently, think about social structures when positing the likelihood of technological civilizations sending out colonizing missions.
I'm more optimistic. Look at all the achievements and all the variety of governments that humanity has had over the past several thousand years. There are going to be a lot of achievements and forms of government over the next million years of human history. And even if we stay on Earth, we will probably have more than a billion years before extinction catches up with us.
Also, even if there are no "big" projects to send humanity out to the stars, it could still happen slowly. Space travel within the solar system is likely to become common in the future, and by the time the next million years of human history have passed, there will likely be a sizable population who have lived their entire lives in space.
Once the solar system fills up with enough space-dwelling people, there will be a gradual push outward deeper and deeper into interstellar space.
