What benefits are there? What we would need is a space 'gold rush' if we wanted to realistically expect any sort of real progress in that direction. Maybe we'll discover that there's oil (for example) on Mars. Maybe we'll see a lot more space speculators.

That's it for financial issues. Of course finances will drive the technology. The most prominent pieces of technology we're missing are faster than light (or warp) engines, and artificial gravity. Warp would let us travel very far very efficiently, and artificial gravity would allow humans to spend extended periods of time in space. A couple other things we're missing are materials to build such starships (not sure if we have anything that would hold such large ships together in space), replicator and transporter technology, phasers, shields/forcefields, and last but not least, proton torpedoes. If anyone knows of technology listed above that exists today, please let me know.

All we really need is a way to be confident that if we send some people out, they will be good for 1000 years. That means food and environment, not forcefields and transporters. Look into the experiments where they tried to isolate humans from the earth environment by sealing them in a airtight greenhouse. (hint: the ants started dieing within a month)

Once you're up there, moving around is pretty easy.

So, space elevators that could bring down surface-to-orbit costs would probably drive a huge boom in space exploration.

No idea how soon we'll have those though.

Anyway, orbit is only 17,000 MPH which is way to slow to go travel to the next star. Traveling at at 17,000 mph would take about 40,000 years to travel one light year. The good news is you slowly accelerate in space over a long time, so smaller high efficiency engines would work just fine. The bad news is the closet star is over 4 light years from earth.

So getting something the size of the space shuttle to the next star in 1,000 years would take 2x (168^2) as much energy as it takes to get to LEO. ~56,500 * 2.2 * 10^12J = ~10^17 jules for comparison that's ~28 thousand megawatt hours.

I doubt we'll be touring other planets in even the next 100 years.

Its 106 yrs (nearly) now since the wright brothers first took to the air and barely 40 since Apollo 11 touched down. So I'd suggest that 100 years is an age to fix those problems in :)

The issue is, I think, that we lost interest in the moon and stars. The space race was driven by politics and so we got there by sheer force. Then it all slackened off again. But I think the next generation will have grown up with enough modern Sci-Fi to think "I wonder if...." and hunger for the sky :)

EDIT: I apologize for the American bias in my post. When I say "our" I am referring to NASA. I think collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and/or the Russian Federal Space Agency would be good to some extent. Of course, this type of collaboration would probably prevent space exploration from becoming a political issue. And for reasons previously described, eliminating the politics from space exploration is probably a bad idea.

we would of course need to send some form of authority, like a warden, just to keep the convicts (loonies!) under control.

it would also be necessary to set them up with an advanced computer system to handle all colony operations, from telephone switching to ballistics calculations for the throws.

all and all, i don't see how this could go wrong.

But I'm judging the next 100 years on the past 20. We did squat compared to what we're potentially capable of. NASA lost about 50% of it's unmanned Mars missions. What a joke.

The cold war was such system. The next one will (hopefully) be more peaceful & market driven. Space flights for tourism provide a few of these increment. Asteroid-mining might be another. Military probably has a few more to play.

None of these have been paying much dividends in the last 30-40 years.

The of protocols and business rules humans create may be capitalism (or some sort of cousin). The rules the universe created need to be tackled no matter what we do.

Read Zubrin's _Entering Space_ for details.

http://www.amazon.com/Entering-Space-Creating-Spacefaring-Ci...

For example, the original Orion project had a means of traveling to Saturn in a year. (Using nuclear bombs to power a spacecraft.)

The various studies on space colonization are also interesting. T.A. Heppenheimer summarizes some of them (in particular, the famous Stanford Summer Study) in his book "Colonies in Space."

Interstellar travel is another thing entirely, though.

The whole space opera thing is fairly unlikely. It's more likely that the world we'll be able to simulate in our own solar system will be much more interesting than any world we'd be able to visit outside of it.

The future depends on what you extrapolate; Star Trek goes from trains to planes to space; right now, lots of interesting fiction goes from PCs to ubiquitous computing to uploads. Whatever's next is unlikely to resemble any of that in any way.

Good point, I had never thought of it like that.

This energy source does not have to be atomic, except we don't know of a fuel more densely packed with energy than atoms. E = mc^2 and all that. In most science fiction, this problem has been solved using mumbo-jumbo technology, such as matter-antimatter reactors. Whatever; maybe someone will one day think of a way to make that work. Solving the energy problem means that the vast amount of effort currently directed at, e.g., oil production, stable trade with parts of the world which produce and sell hydrocarbon fuels, and climate maintenance can free up to really push things forward.

Just think of the rockets we could build if they didn't need to use awful rocket propellants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_propellant) or nuclear explosions for fuel. And I'll try to make sure the controlling software for those rockets uses Lisp. :)

The thing is - we have no way of knowing what life in the future will be like. There might not be anything we recognize as human life there in the first place.

I'm continuously amazed by the here and now. I've been all around the world. I have friends all over this planet. I communicate with people all over the world via the net every single day. And my friends? Ha! They could be anywhere and all I have to do is pick up my cell phone and call them. ('Uh, can I call you back, I'm in Singapore for some work thing and it's 4 am here..').

I love speculative sci-fi, but not to the extent that I want to not be born in this age. Put things into perspective if not living in the super-happy-fun sci-fi future gets you depressed.

I'm not cut out for farming or the floppy wigs of the past.

It's a common bias to overestimate technological and societal change in the short term, and underestimate them in the long term. Think of those McCarthy-era AI guys promising GAI in a decade: I bet you $100 that their vision for the next 4 decades was surprisingly conservative and unimaginative. The same men who imagined GAI in their lifetimes were most likely the same men who could not imagine the full societal implications of civil rights legislation.

I should expect the world in 500 years to be as unimaginable, complex, and alien as the world now is to someone from the 16th century. I hate to make an argument from fictional evidence, but there is no reason at all to prefer a Rodenberry future as opposed to an Egan future. The former is refuted by witnessing how pervasive and tempting it is to anchor future change on the present.

If Charlemagne and Shakespeare could understand the future, it's a bad indication for how realistic you are being.

There is some good "hard" sci-fi out there that you should read if you want some interesting suggestions regarding "what will life look like in X years" and I will let others jump in with some of their favorites (e.g. Vinge, Bear, Stross, etc)

What's hot right now in aeronautics seems to be better communication and navigation satellites. Maybe these will push the boundaries of space technology?

1. The capability to have all my DNA sequences stored.

2. The capability to create an organism that has exact DNA sequence as me.

3. The capability to have all my memory inside my brain read out.

4. The capability to restored all my memory to the organism created in step 2.

5. The capability to remove aging effect on my brain and body.

6. An organization that is willing to keep the technology and data above passed down by time without errors and is willing to teach the resurrected me what the new world is and help me to fit in without questions and still grant me freedom or treat me as a 2nd class citizen.

If there exists such technologies and organizations, we are all endowed with eternal life and are capable of seeing all new possible technologies in Star Trek to show up...

Great! 'cos you're living on one :)

Very far. We can't travel faster than light and at the moment not even close to it. We have vague ideas that warp drives might be possible, but generating, containing and manipulating enough energy to work in some of the suggestions is also currently unthinkable. We're at the stage of needing multiple unpredictable breakthroughs to get anywhere close, and that leaves travel to the nearest extra-solar anything taking many years.

Also, the Star Trek technology is very inconsistent, I don't think we are going that way. I haven't seen the new film (yet) but from the TV series, there are numerous questions. How come nobody else ever has Geordie-style visors as an option? Or any kind of optical or neural enhancement or display? Or any kind of body armour?

Why is there no nanotechnology anywhere except when the Borg turn up? Why isn't there an anti-Borg good cyborg species? They destroy entire star ships so frequently and inconsequentially that they must have tremendous manufacturing capability, but wouldn't that have more ramifications somehow? How come Picard has a replacement heart and Geordi a brain-connected replacement vision, and everyone can be rebuilt by the teleporter, but they all have wrinkles and age and die? Why don't they throw half the Enterprise away and replace it with a much smaller holodeck with simulated rooms? Why does nobody ever ask the computer anything interesting? Why can't Data improve himself or replicate himself? Or merge with the ship's computer? Why has nobody built a machine to pick up what Deanna Troi's empathic sense does and done away with the whole "Computer, where is x?" "x's badge fell off so I can't find them" thing?

Why is nobody sitting at home on Earth and using the magical instantaneous subspace communication to explore with unmanned spacecraft?

So, yeah - space: big, cold, empty. planet bankruptingly expensive.

I think more realistic is that man gets a toehold on space by being able to harness resources from other planets / asteroids. If people can become self-sufficient in space, perhaps generation after generation, we can creep out further into space.

But it takes a big initial commitment and it's unlikely we'll ever resolve all the problems on earth so I'm not sure how much of a priority it will be.

To understand, take a piece of paper and imagine you're on one end of it trying to get across. Instead of traveling the length of the paper just fold it in half and jump to the other side.

When you folding a paper. Your reference frame is outside that piece of paper. You also possess energy supply outside the paper to exert the deformation of the material on the paper. But you did not posses the energy to fold the "space" around that paper.

In fact, even you fold it, you and that piece of paper are still in the same 4-d space time. Unless you are the lucky intelligent beings that are living on that piece of paper such as a colony of bacteria. Now it is the time to jump to the other side the paper!

So I guess the first step to construct a warp drive is to figure out questions:

1. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper evoke help from extra dimensional source and energy from it?"

2. "Can we as bacteria living on that piece of paper control this mechanism?"

3. "Can the above mechanism to be achieved without ruining basic physics laws such as law of matter energy conservation, laws of thermodynamics in marcophysics scale".

As long as we figure the possibility for those questions in physics, then we will know can we travel like Star Trek.

Don't get me wrong. I love Star Trek. And my undergraduate major was physics. But I know very few general relativity theory and problems. What I just said is just consider what is necessary if we want to fold the space time.

My original point was that going faster than light in a straight line isn't the goal. The goal is to bend/fold/warp space around you and get to another physical point is space before light does.

Edit: I'm saying bending space, which happens all around us, is more likely a scenario than traveling faster than light. Is this statement wrong?

We bend the material, but we did not bend the space.

I always find it amusing when people look at these hypothetical designs and say "Hey, it must be possible!" Because what I see is a universe that absolutely hates FTL and will destroy anything that looks like it might achieve it with extreme prejudice, yanking the space-time rug out from underneath your atomic feet.

What does it mean to say you wish you were born 500 years from now?

Explain: what would have to happen for that to be so?