[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.