We have to leave. We have to evolve a might bit more than we have so far, and we have to get up and go. In about two billion years, the milky way will collide with the Andromeda galaxy. Things might just get really hectic about that time, and we need to be ready. This means we need to start as soon as possible.
At the very least, we need to be capable of interplanetary travel, and not the kind that makes space operas possible. Can't count on warp or folding or even "irrelevant" space to get us from star to star with in as much time as it takes to get from New York to L.A.; such things might come around, but its best we don't count on them. Its a long game, involving great distance, and nearly infinite obstacles of various kinds. We need practice, results, and at the very least the willingness to make the attempts.
My suggestions? Lets start with getting something moving fast enough to make it out of the solar system in a reasonable amount of time. The Voyager spacecraft have been in flight since 1977, and are just now at the point where they can be said to have cracked the shell of our solar system. Impressive as they are, those two little robots took a generation just to get to what might be called 'interstellar space'.
So faster; thats stage one. we have nice ion engines now with impressive hypothetical top speeds, and have come a long way in rocketry and gravity 'slingshot' methods, so lets make believe for a moment we can come within a decimal point of the hypothetical .3C an ion engine is capable of. Lets pretend we can get a Volkwagen sized robot up to .03C, or roughly 3% of the speed of light. That would put travel time to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, at roughly 200 years.
This is the first point at which most people just give up. Nobody can live long enough to see it get there. Steps taken to prolong human lifespan might be needed just to get people even willing to try. The bad news here is that .03C is actually an incredibly optimistic average speed. It may be more realistic to say that it is the peak speed; this is an important distinction, in that depending on the thrust provided by the ion (or whatever) engine, our probe might just barely achieve that speed, and then have to turn around and start braking, lest it overshoot or pass through the Proxima system without having much time to do anything. Imagining that this is the case, it might be better if we just imagine that the journey will take a thousand years.
Adjustments to human lifespan most likely won't cover that. There has to be a change in thinking, a remap of priority; a willingness to invest time and resources into a project with a relatively low payoff, which in any case would not bear fruit for centuries, even if we cheat a little and leave the thing on to explore every inch of space between, say, the Pluto/Charon orbit and the heliopause of Proxima Centauri.
The question is: what sort of timespan does it take to capture and retain human interest? At what point do the spans in time in space become too much for the human mind to bear, and render a verdict in the common mind: "Can't Be Done"
I mean, the first journey we make to another star may very well take as long as the whole development of civilization from the first bronze tool to launch date. Maybe longer.
I mean, to be fair, we just got here. Let's be conservative and say we've only really been civilized for two thousand, maybe three thousand years or so. That's probably a more realistic idea of what our maximum effort can accomplish concerning the exploration of Proxima Centauri, though we might get lucky and be able to visit Alpha Centauri in the same shot; once thought to be the closest, and still considered to be as near as makes no difference, a twin of our own star.
Now, lets be a little less conservative, and imagine that the roots of modern human civilization goes back to just before the last ice age, say, 15-30 thousand years. Thats more perspective, but as little archeology and absolutely no written material from such antiquity exists, we can only really speculate. Even so, we have to look at spending as much time or more making it to the next use-able, life sustaining system.
Whats next after the Centauri Stars? My money is on Epsilon Eridani. Its younger than our star, and is believed to still be in accretion as a system, though two or maybe three gas giants have already formed. It's a paltry 10-11 light years away, and gaining distance.
Epsilon Eridani is the right kind of star; similar to Sol, though supposed to be somewhat less massive -a condition which may change as the system becomes stable over the next few million up to a billion years or so. Plenty of time for us to get there, somehow or another, and cultivate living space for ourselves and at least a representation of our ecosystem. It may take a million years for us to even begin establishing a colony there, but its worth it. We need the practice.
One hopes that in time and by making the attempt, advances in technology will let us go farther and faster, and we will be able, in a million years' time to launch even more ambitious missions, and make dramatic changes to ourselves in the process to make survival easier in a variety of environments.
Can't count on it, though. More likely, in the time it takes for a single probe to visit and explore Epsilon Eridani, Civilization on Earth will vanish, and perhaps return, perhaps more than once. We have more imminent problems than the Andromeda Incursion; more immediate problems even than the handful of unstable stars in our vicinity, capable of changing the face of our solar system even from light years away, just by dying violent deaths.
We have, for example, Yellowstone, and a few other critters like it, capable of essentially destroying significant parts of a continent, and instigating global extinction events -a potential increased by the existence of nuclear facilities and materials, which will certainly contribute to problems of ecological sustainability, even if a global winter and subsequent ice age aren't enough; even if a super-volcano eruption doesn't touch off a period of tectonic instability leading to volcanic chain-reaction.
Even before that, we might have to really worry about the bees.
Or maybe, even, airborne Ebola.
So yeah. Lets start packing. It might be safer for us elsewhere. We could start, maybe, with another trip to the moon?
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