We'll never reach the stars.
People have no concept of distance. Longest I ever walked in a day was around twenty miles, traveling at my own pace on paved sidewalks, with frequent opportunities to refresh myself. Teddy Roosevelt issued the first formal physical fitness test for US servicemen after seeing some fat officers. You had to do fifty miles on foot, or a hundred on horseback, with a three day time limit.
A group of Marines set out and completed the test in a day, but they're like that.
Fifty miles. It's five thousand times that distance to the Moon, and the US doesn't, at present, have the ability to send a person there. Mars is nine months, not gonna look up the distance, and yeah, we still send rovers there.
Opportunity will be declared dead in a few minutes.
But how much longer are we going to spend money on the space program, whatever that is these days? Some Canadian with a guitar? The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is going to break loose, one meter sea level rise, massive numbers of IDPs, crop failures, coral will be extinct in ten years, you think anyone is going to want to spend money sending people to Mars?
Maybe the oligarchs will. Bolthole and all.
And the Chinese are going to put someone on the Moon, by hook or by crook, just to prove they can.
Maybe they'll die there. I hold no animosity towards them, but it would be nice if someone managed to put a corpse up there to prove to our successors in evolution that we could do it.
But we'll soon be up to our ankles in a red-tide algal bloom that will never recede, fighting over who gets the last bit of dogmeat.
The stars. Kepler 452B is a "second Earth" and it's only 1400 light years away.
There are only eleven stars within ten light years of the solar system, and only one of those is relatively similar to the sun, but it's a binary, which is where "relatively" goes out the window.
Even if we developed that warp drive, somebody would just mount a missile on it and use it to play smashy spike plate with someone else's capital city.
It's almost 4 am, time for bed. Miles to go, but not light years.
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