[Florin_Andrei]

> Universe has plenty of space

True, but that might actually be the challenge. There's too much space out there.

I live in California. Let's say the Sun is a soccer ball right here next to me. Then the Earth is a large grain of sand a few meters away. Jupiter is a marble a few blocks down the road. Speed of light is like an ant running.

And the nearest star is another soccer ball way out in Greenland. Think about that for a second.

http://florin.myip.org/blog/i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-solar...

To get out of the confines of the solar system, we need some massive breakthrough. Probably entirely new physics.

[blacksmith_tb]

Or to accept that we'll have to settle for expanding throughout our own solar system, which has quite a lot of real estate (especially moons and asteroids). We might even manage some probes to nearby stars.

[anon1mous]

No, if we really wanted we could build an H-Bomb spaceship in a decade or two and fly to the nearest stars in a few decades.

[Florin_Andrei]

It takes forever to get there. We know of no habitable exoplanet yet, so when you do get there, you still live in a tin can in orbit.

I'm not saying we'll never make it. I'm saying the magnitude of the effort is enormous. In a sense, Sart Trek and Star Wars have done a disservice to space exploration by making it seem so easy.

The scales of energy, time, and complexity involved are colossal.