[simonh]

I've been homing in on this conclusion, or a neighbour of it for a while. Take the periodic table. That's it people, we already know all the stable elements. Nobody's going to discover unobtanium. Aside from some high energy physics and some details of quantum mechanics, we probably know most of the useful practical physic there is. The open frontiers are biology and chemistry, but those are all about combinging things we mostly already know about in new and interesting ways. Eventually we'll figure all of those out as well. Then what?

I'm not saying it's impossible we'll discover some amazing, paradigm shaking new physics that will upend everything. Maybe. But we can't bank on it and it's entirely possible no such civilisation shaping new physics exists.

If that's the case, then the future will all be about engineering based on parameters we already pretty much know. I often see the Daedalus project held up as 'proof' interstellar travel and even interstellar colonization are possible. That was a designs for a very modest space probe payload, but even so the resources required to build them would pauper our whole civilization. Even if, or when, we master the resources of our whole solar system, those probes would be a significant cost and it seems likely they're way too puny to deliver a robust self-replicating bootstrap infrastructure. There's nothing inevitable or necessary about interstellar colonisation. The universe doesn't owe us Star Trek.