[ansible]

> The point is it's arrogant to say what's impossible for all time, because nearly everything we do today was impossible a short thousand years ago.

I never said impossible, I said impractical.

If you are content with really long travel times (thousands or tens of thousands of years one-way), then of course you can travel to other stars.

By the time such means are available, I doubt that entities will bother with shipping matter two ways over such distances.

Also, if you're talking about an uploaded or otherwise synthetic consciousness, that entity may be experiencing time a 100x or more faster than a baseline human does now. So a then thousand year trip would seem like a million years. That's a long time to stay away.

[eloff]

That seems likely from our perspective, but it's pretty arrogant to think we understand the limitations and desires of civilizations millions or even billions of years ahead of us.

Certainly we would have failed at that task of predicting our own limits and desires just hundreds of years ago, nevermind an alien race.