It is not at all unreasonable to think similar opportunities for propulsion may exist in space.
All that you say is true. I didn't think there was any wind in space. All there is to space is gravitational pull or lack of it. It's nothingness. The MAIN problem is the absolutely unbelievable distances. ONE lousy light year is, written out, 5,878,499,810,000 miles – 1 light year in miles.
Astronomy doesn't even use miles; they use parsecs.
Example: 1 parsec (3.3 light-years). Take the ONE light year and multiply. Distances are just too great. And, according to the astronomers our galaxy is EXPANDING and thus the distances are getting greater.
Google: This list contains all known stars and brown dwarfs at a distance of up to 5 parsecs (16.3 light-years) from the Solar System, ordered by increasing distance. In addition to the Solar System, there are another 55 stellar systems currently known lying within this distance. These systems contain a total of 56 hydrogen-fusing stars (of which 46 are red dwarfs), 14 brown dwarfs, and 4 white dwarfs. Despite the relative proximity of these objects to the Earth, only nine of them have an apparent magnitude less than 6.5, which means only about 13% of these objects can be observed with the naked eye.
Besides the Sun, only three are first-magnitude stars: Alpha Centauri, Sirius, and Procyon. All of these objects are located in the Local Bubble, a region within the Orion–Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Bottom line: we do not have the components on earth to travel that far. Our life spans are too short, so we would have to travel hibernating for THOUSANDS of years. Our bodies just don't last that long, even in stasis.
Also bottom line: what we have on earth is what's out there. There are NO other elements but what's on our very generic periodic chart of the elements that you looked at in chemistry class. Just can't be done with what we have and there is nothing different out there in the way of elements.
Scientists have combined frozen, boiled and baked (just kidding on the last one) every known element and any possible combination to get to some kind of "new fuel." The fuels we've used to escape earth and go to the moon were tested and found to be great. But, as was said, the NEAREST stars, totally uninhabitable for us, are too far away for our fuels...and that is all there is in existence. We couldn't build a big enough ship to carry us out there and return to earth.
DISTANCE...that tiny little word.
One lousy little light year is almost 6 trillion miles. Hah, Carl Sagan would have had a field day with that: BILLIONS AND BILLIONS!!
One sci-fi answer was to mind travel. Maybe our minds can go distances where our bodies, ships and supplies cannot.
Well, technically speaking there is such a thing as solar wind, which can in theory be used to provide low-acceleration propulsion. But IMO it will never make space travel, settlement or commerce practical.
Here’s my point. The basic conundrum of physics is the apparent contradiction between quantum mechanics and relativity. As far as we can tell QM accurately describes how very small things work, and relativity how large things work. But they can’t both be true as they stand because there isn’t enough energy and matter in the observable universe to make the sums come out.
So scientists calmly produce various theories with regard to dark energy and dark matter, which supposedly make up to more the 90% of our universe, even if we can’t see/sense them.
Combine this with one (actually several) of the more popular theories proposed to explain the contradition between QM and relativity, string theory. These theories propose some number of additional dimensions we cannot sense, but which still affect our universe through gravity and possibly other means.
It seems to me that additional dimensions, if they exist, allow for all kinds of potential “loopholes” in the commonly accepted Einsteinian limitations on propulsion and speed limits. If they don’t and dark matter/energy don’e either, then our understnding of physics is severely flawed and better understanding might find other ways to move around the universe.