In 1870 it was said:
We are barely in the kindergarten stage of oil-powered vehicles, and hundreds of years away from actually exploring automobiles...
Actually, no one in 1870 said that.
The closest star is how far? And human DNA is already degraded by spaceflight on as short of distances we presently make. And we can yet see the technologies that will allow spaceflight durations that will last many years, perhaps a lifetime. No, the analogy from automobiles to space travel does not work. Too many things are not parallel at all.