Are we to become starfarers?

I hope so, but it most probably won't be in my lifetime. [Link]

We're destined to go to the stars. That's the assumption we've been making for a century, and I daresay most readers believe this as surely as they believe we'll eventually cure dandruff.

Our anticipation of an interstellar destiny is not merely the consequence of too many couch-hours spent watching Spandex-suited astronauts in Star Trek, Star Wars, or Futurama. It's been a subtext of our space program. You might recall a low-grade, 1960 biopic about Wernher von Braun entitled I Aim at the Stars. Or perhaps you know the sunny motto of the National Space Society: "ad astra" ("to the stars"). Boldly sending our descendants into the galaxy's stellar realms seems as inevitable as teen sex.

I like the idea of becoming a spacefaring society. It's just a matter of how far we'll fare. Yes, we'll colonize our cosmic backyard; after all, if our species has not spread beyond Earth within a century, then we're headed for eternal internal conflict and armageddon@home. In the words of rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, humans can't stay in the cradle forever.

I trust we'll soon be landing people on Mars, and eventually the satellites of the outer planets. I anticipate the construction of space habitats on the moon, the asteroids, and in orbit around Earth.

But colonizing the vicinities of other stars is enormously harder than settling the solar system. Our fastest rockets can take us to Neptune in less than a decade - a long ride, but not inconceivable. On the other hand, a trip to the closest star system, Alpha Centauri, would take 75,000 years.