Does Humanity's Destiny Lie in Interstellar Space Travel?

[kevindavis007]

Imagine a time when humans, having spent decades exploring the solar system through landings on Venus and Mars; passages by the largest asteroids; close-up surveys of Jupiter and its giant moons; repeated loops through Saturn's system of rings and satellites; detailed photography of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto; and even landing on a comet, finally create a coherent plan to travel through interstellar space to reach the nearest stars and their planets.


That time has almost arrived. Once NASA's Dawn spacecraft arrives at the asteroid Ceres in March of this year , and the space agency's New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto in July, humans will have completed the solar system exploration described above. They will have done so, of course, by creating complex and highly capable spacecraft that not only secure high-resolution images of the objects they encounter, but also roll across planetary surfaces to measure local conditions in a dozen different ways, including spectroscopic and chemical analysis of the composition and history of each object.


Source: http://interstellar-news.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/does-humanitys-destiny-lie-in.html

[kevindavis007]

My answer is hell yes...

[ABX]

As long as we aren't wiped out before we can get the technology for reasonable travel outside our solar system (versus 100K years to get somewhere).

I like the idea of genetic bacterial seeding of the universe. Engineer highly resilient bacteria that contains the genetic code of our life (something that could evolve into something like us under the right circumstances- or at least evolve into something), create highly durable space probes that can last millions of years in space, and send them in all directions. Millions of small ones, like the shotgun approach.

[kevindavis007]

As long as we aren't wiped out before we can get the technology for reasonable travel outside our solar system (versus 100K years to get somewhere).

I like the idea of genetic bacterial seeding of the universe. Engineer highly resilient bacteria that contains the genetic code of our life (something that could evolve into something like us under the right circumstances- or at least evolve into something), create highly durable space probes that can last millions of years in space, and send them in all directions. Millions of small ones, like the shotgun approach.

I'm open to one idea, it is what they showed in Interstellar. Embryo space colonization.. We can also build a Nuclear Pulse Propulsion rocket (like the one in Ascension).

[Dexter]

Humans constantly do the impossible, and then seek to push the limits further. This trend will not change; our destiny has no limits.