[RALaBarge]

Personally, I am willing to bet that all intelligent life will end up being quite lonely. Unless we find ways to bend space, there is little chance of us ever getting out of our local solar system, let alone galaxy or the local galactic cluster.

I am a big fan of science and science fiction, do not get me wrong. I do feel that technology evolves and will surprise even the most tech savvy, but to violate faster than light travel seems more far fetched than any theory out there to me.

[bhc3]

I'm expecting somewhere way down the road, scientists will unlock the secrets to prolonging our lives for nearly forever. They'll stop the telomeres from degrading, come up with ways to address cancer quickly and effectively, etc.

At the same time, space travel technology will also have been advanced, allowing for self-sustaining spacecraft that offer protection against the harsh environment of outer space.

At that point, you can imagine that a hearty band of explorers will undertake a mission of leaving our solar system and exploring way beyond our world. Who knows how far they could get.

These are the sorts of advances I can imagine becoming real many generations from now. I wouldn't underestimate our capacity to make it happen.

[S4M]

If you want to speculate, how about the possibility of uploading people's mind to a robot? Let's say that we are able to send outer space a bunch of self replicating robots (they can travel to various planets and build a copy of themselves using the raw materials they can find there). After some time, we have lots of robots at many points in space, then you make a copy of your mind and send it at the speed of light to those robots. Because of the self replicating nature of the thing, we can have lots of robots so anybody who wants to can upload his/her mind to one of them. That way we have a non risky an relatively cheap way to explore the galaxy - it would just take couple of thousands of years to have everything set up.

[XorNot]

Still a relatively slow way to get around. We have some co-factor here for "median time between alien contacts" which might be thousands of years. In which case they came, they saw, and the people who saw them remembered it as folk tales.

[scrumper]

"Speed" could be seen in terms of perceived time for distance covered. No reason with a robot-uploaded consciousness that you couldn't slow its perception of time such that travel between the stars becomes something comprehensible by a human-like mind. A bit like video game time acceleration, but real.

That doesn't address what happens to the visitees, but if that kind of slow-scale exploration becomes the default, then any civilizations on a similar level to the robot explorers would have technology and societal structures in place to support meaningful contact of that nature.

[specialist]

> stop the telomeres from degrading

Both our bodies and minds need to hardened to endure deep space.

10,000 years between stars is a long time to be playing solitaire. The voyagers may need to sleep, hibernate, slow down their metabolism, alter their perception of time, or something, to make the journey bearable.

[chongli]

10,000 years between stars is a long time to be playing solitaire.

That's assuming our space ships resemble a Saturn V or the Space Shuttle. Why limit ourselves to that? How about a colony ship the size of New York City, built in orbit, housing millions of people? At that point we don't even need to live thousands of years; we'd have a generational ship.

[aswanson]

I'm skeptical as well...but...something at the beginning of the universe caused it to expand far faster than the speed of light...something, some unknown force is causing it's continuous expansion. There are many deep, fundamental questions we don't know about the universe. FTL travel may be possible, but I wouldn't bet on it.

[RALaBarge]

I present to you the answer that I most prefer for that question: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

[arglebarnacle]

I'm hoping that even though we don't seem to be so lucky, there are other solar systems out there with multiple worlds where intelligent life developed roughly in parallel.

At least someone in the universe would be living out my space opera fantasies!