Baby steps, first a Moon Pie then a Mars bar then a Milky Way.
Discovery of some sort of warp in space-time "wormholes" or the like to jump the distances. Otherwise the relativistic time issues are going to create a bunch of totally disconnected nodes of humanity never to contact each other again. Once someone has left, that is it. No further contact, ever. in a useful manner. Radio conversations with multiyear pauses between replies do not work so well I should think. And that would be for close neighbors.
>What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?
A lot of Mars Bars. ;-)
IMHO, the whole enterprise is “beyond imagining”. The reality of these distances conquers any notion we may rationally maintain of traversing them. I may cite the Fermi paradox ... where is everybody?
“Forget arks. We’re going to have to do it with speedy starships, so that people can get there in a couple of years (ship’s time), or not at all. And before we do that, robotic scout vehicles are going to have to check the planet out first to determine its habitability. Condemning generations of unborn innocent people to spend their lives in some nightmare, totalitarian prison ark is inhumane, unethical in the extreme.”
An asteroid the size of Ceres has been calculated to provide as many hectares/acres of arable land inside the asteroid as all of the arable land on the Earth. Such a craft would be a mobile world rather than a restrictive prison. A cavern space wit a ceiling about 700 meters in height is sufficient to give the impression of a blue sky, while centrifugal force provides a substitute for Earth’s gravity necessary for good health.
Ummm, I think we have already colonized the Milky Way. It is called Earth.
Never happen, we will not go back to the moon, or ever try for Mars. After Jesus comes and kicks some evil bootay yes. Man by himself, we are too busy fighting each other and always will be.
It's only a matter of time until some rebel physicist breaks the universal speed limit of 186,000 mps, then all bets are off. The whole universe will open up for the humans of this little mud ball we call planet earth.
Well, we have to go back to the moon first. It’s been almost 50 years since we’ve been there. Currently, the U.S. can even refly John Glenn’s mission without paying for a Russian seat. :-(
Immortality.
After the first few colonies, we can automate the process.
Send a colony ship with self-replicating robots to do all the work of building habitats, stockpiling fuel and materials, making air and water, raising food, and then terraforming the new world.
Once everything is ready, take some embryos out of the freezer and raise the kids (a great clone army). Call home and report in, or lay low and try to hide from the government (no reason to think they will be any better then).
Then start building and launching an endless stream of further colony ships.
Repeat exponentially.
Let us not be unkind to creatures beyond our realm, and restrict human perfected suffering and misery to our own planet.
Nothing. It has already been done.
Let’s go surfin’ now...
A chocolate outer layer ought get it done...
What Will It Take for Humans to Colonize the Milky Way?
Answer: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence.
Someone’s sides are splitting in a galaxy faraway.
I thought Captain Picard was already doing this...
People have a poor concept of who we are and how we live on this world. We live in a soup of bacteria, viruses and prions. A 150 pound man carries about five pounds of genetic stuff that is not his. Because those cells are so tiny there are actually billions more of them than he has of his own human cells.
It’s likely that any planet we would want to visit already has its own bacteria. Bacteria likes to live in moist, nutrient full places, like our crotch and armpits. We can coexist with our own sea of junk because we evolved with it and are mostly immune to it except under special circumstances. But even the simplest and most harmless seeming alien would likely not be recognized by our provincial immune systems and would have free reign.
I laughed every time Kirk kissed some blue alien, thinking, -man, you’re going to regret that!-
Forget speedy starships, the galaxy will be populated by humans if humans develop sufficiently advanced AI,robotics, genetics, embryonic and seed storage as to send automated arks full of all the basic frozen ingredients to seed a planet upon arriving at a suitable one.
The AI and firstborn humans might find the planet already inhabited with life and even decide that the planet is not really suitable for Earth life unless the Earth forms are hybridized with native life in order to adapt to the planet.
A program of abduction, genetic testing and release would commence. If the native life is intelligent, you would want to make sure you maintain secrecy all throughout the hybridization and infiltration process until your numbers were sufficient and looked enough like the native beings to pass for one.