To me, it feels like a further step in advancing human civilization. Disperse the population a bit and keep growing as a species. That said, I’m no expert and if you have literature to recommend please do!

    • bluGill@fedia.io
      4·
      3 days ago

      Not by enough. We will advance, but the speed of light is still a hard limit that we won’t get close to.

      we are not able to detect a civialization as advanced as us but orbiting our nearest star (which probably can’t have life as we know it) if they aimed all their antennas at once at us and we happened to turn all our antennas to them at the right speed.

      there is no reason to think we can make a spaceship that will make it to the nearest star. Even if we could make a generation ship survive, if the star doesn’t have perfect conditions for life we won’t be able to redirect to enough stars to hope to find one (assume one exists and we ignore the ethical problems of invading like that - both we should not ignore but this is too long already)

      mars is just slighly more life friendly than the worst parts of antartica. We could maybe get something there self supporting, but it will be with massive investments. Everything else is far far worse. (We will probably get someone to mars and back in a few years, but it won’t be a place to raise a family)

      anything worth doing in space involves robots. If you want to ‘inspire man’ or make life better on earth there are better ways.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      BillGill said it better than I could - speed of light limitation.

      I can add that our nearest star is 4 light-years away, so if we could travel at the speed of light it would still take 4 years to get there.

      We can’t even travel a fraction the speed of light yet - even if we could there are massive challenges to even approaching a fraction of the speed of light.

      As for something magical like warp, well that’s still just ideas.