We were going to be the generation that went to the stars. We can’t even send people to the moon. I doubt if we will be able to keep sending people to the space station. We laugh at the story of The Tower Of Babel, yet, we live it every day. Some of us have hearts that long to explore the universe, but, while we can escape the earth’s gravity, we cannot escape the people on earth with all of their fears and needs and jealousies. The realities of earth destroy the dreams of space. And it isn’t overpopulation or pollution or war.....it’s our smallness that holds us back.
But that smallness is what we have to work with.
I think in the end, I think it will be much like the idea that Ian Banks forwards in his Culture novels: we end up designing vast artificial intelligences that are friendly and benign to humanity and get us to the stars. It is not clear to me that any committee or super-human-brain could do it. A system so smart it can navigate our regulatory structures like walking through a pasture is for us, and yet can comprehend the extreme physics required to get us out there safely and cheaply.
Yes, we can do small very focused missions out, but we really need to solve the energy problems of getting into space. Right now, we sit ourselves on piles of explosives and basically control explode ourselves into space. It will never make for a mass transit system. Even the access means of Virgin Galactic is not incredibly efficient, just leaps and bounds above how we do it commercially now.
Still very dangerous and very fuel intensive.
There has to be a better way...