Of course, we are there ( in space ) now, as we ride the earth. It’s just a question of moving around a little bit more. Also of course, even with unlimited ambition humans could never visit more than a tiny fraction of what we can survey. The article emphasizes the difficulties of visiting Mars, which is a single step from our door, as it were. Travel to even the nearest stars has to be judged impossible.
I don’t give up that easily. Had we continued at the rate that took us to the moon I have no doubt we would have been at mars and beyond. Granted the stars are would still be well out of our reach but that doesn’t mean they would be forever.
The fact that we’ve been doing next to nothing is the reason there haven’t been big developments.
For now.
I remember back in the 70s all these so called "Smart people" proclaiming the Noise Wall will never be breached due to physics.
The noise wall is a term used in the Analog recording industry basically it refers to the Ambient background noise that is recorded each time you make a copy of a recording. Eventually the noise level becomes so great you can't here the original recording.
Then came digital recording and the noise wall was not only breached it was destroyed forever being digital recording can make copy after copy because you aren't dealing with analog background noise each time you make a copy.
So when I hear the words impossible applied to a given situation I just smile. Because such things are funny when you realize we can't know what we don't know till we know it and thus we can't ever claim something is impossible with 100% accuracy!