Originally posted by kevcvs57
I would rather go out with a man made bang than a slow death by solar, we should pick up our game and take the sun out first, and as a bonus there would be no global warming.
Seriously how can you look at the technological innovations of the last 2 to 300yrs and claim with any certainty that we will not attain interstellar travel before we destroy ourselves rwingett the negative.
Because the level of strain we are placing on the Earth's ecosystems far exceeds the level of technological development needed to fly us away to somewhere else. In the last 2 to 300 years we have only succeeded in placing man on our own moon. We haven't even gone to another planet within our own solar system, let alone that of another solar system. And there are no prospects that we will do so any time soon. But we push the environment closer and closer to the brink of collapse on a daily basis.
To put it another way:
1. More technologically advanced societies consume more resources per capita than less advanced ones.
2. The level of resources necessary to sustain a space faring society eclipses any planet's ability to provide them.
3. Therefore, every civilization will necessarily collapse in upon itself before it has achieved the level of technology required for the ever elusive goal of inter-stellar space travel.
It is an unachievable fantasy. You have been conditioned since birth by Star Trek style fiction to think that space travel in inevitable, but it isn't going to happen for the same reason that we are never visited by other space faring civilizations. They will have necessarily destroyed themselves before being able to break free from their habitat.