“The irony of space travel: the first to venture toward the stars will be greeted by their generations-hence long-arrived descendants.”
huh?
The first to travel will be in either suspended animation or generational ships.
Our future generations will figure out FTL travel and be at the destination points when the suspended/generational ships arrive.
Clay Moore: “With our technology, if we had sent our Voyager spacecraft on an intercept course to the next nearest star to our sun, it would take about 100K years to arrive.”
null and void: “We can have probes there in about 20 years.”
Me: If we’d sent people to Alpha Centauri in 1977 (when we launched Voyager 1), then sent their kids today (using possible modern rocket technology), the second group would arrive 99,956 years before the first. To wit, the first to venture out could be greeted by their great*3330-grandchildren.
If you wait for interstellar technology to improve, you can get there much faster than if you left sooner using less advanced tech.