Keep imagining! Going to any stellar system, except the very closest, will take much longer than any human lifetime. Not many people would volunteer to go, knowing that they will die on the way and be ejected into space, and that their offspring will wind up the same way, and that 10 generations down the road a distant descendant will set foot on a distant planet.
And forget about warp drives or wormholes. They’re for science fiction writers or scientists who need more grant money.
Sometimes technologies are so disruptive that they just collapse time and distance. Railroads back in the 19th century were one. In the eastern USA canals were built in the 1820’s. This technology is roughly 5000 years old. Railroads were built starting in the 1830’s. They were a 5000 year leap forward, collapsing the time it took to get between places.
Roughly the same thing is going on today with computers only in reverse. They are collapsing distance by collapsing the time it takes to work through the issues of space travel. The faster computers go — the sooner will come intersteller travel.
We live in a moment of time during which computers are one speed. 10 years ago computers were much slower—so intersteller travel was much further in the future. 10 years from now computers will be much faster so intersteller travel will come much sooner.
I look to the Kurizwell’s inflection point in +-2039. He figures computers will become sentient at that point.
I don’t know that that will happen. But its likely that technology will move to the point where all the ingredients will be in place for large scale off world migrations. Certainly anyone paying attention today knows that by then 3d printing and advanced robotics will make offworld mining and manufacture quite do able. Thorium, h3 and water on the moon and mars will enable stable plentiful power sources.
My WAG is that large offworld migrations begin about 2050-60.
That’s breakout into the solar system.
Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek—which came out in 1969— took place mostly between 2250 and 2290. That’s roughly the same distance in the future as the French and Indian wars of 1750 and the american constitution’s creation in 1790 are in the past. That puts already mature interstellar travel 250 years in the future.
A more primitive form of interstellar travel is shown in the 2009 movie Avatar. This movie is set roughly 150 years from now in the mid 22nd century.
It has been roughly 500 years since Columbus sailed across the atlantic.
Our age today is very like that one.
This low budget 70s series had an interesting premise about multi-century space travel to save part of the human race.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xWGxqq37_Q