Yes, there are challenges. But a 'Rendezvous with Rama' approach, combined with humans in cryosleep? There's no scientific barrier with this kind of approach. Yes, it won't happen soon, nor will it take a reasonable amount of time, but it IS possible.

Can’t even get my friends to buy a used electric car instead of a diesel. Which is an improvement in drivability and comfort - maybe a mild inconvenience for some. Imagine trying to make humans do larger changes in their lives. I think, this won’t happen voluntarily.

>issues with microgravity

I don't get it. You can make a ship big enough to house an entire civilization, for tens of thousands of years, but you can't spin it?

An incredibly boring and unimaginative rehash of naysaying draped over a thinly disguised ideological agenda. Why is this on the front page?

Edit: it's from a student newspaper from back in 2020, that explains a bit about the content but not why it's being upvoted. My guess is a bunch of people read the headline and confirmed their own beliefs.

I wonder if even drone ships could communicate back to earth effectively if we sent them out so far. We'd probably have to wait forever for the robots to come back to find out what they learned, like waiting for ships to transit the Atlantic for news of America, you just hope they make it back.

Low quality bait.

If humans would be able to settle Mars and asteroid belt, there is no limit to how far you can expand onwards.

Hard to take any article on this subect seriously when the author can't conceive of (and argue against the solution of) centrifugal force used for artificial gravity.

Arguments in favor of not destroying our home planet are a good thing, but the article is shallow enough to hurt the author's cause.

April 1st, 2020

I don't think that was intentional, but it might as well have been.

well not at the current level of technology

they don't even know how to keep astronauts from going blind or losing muscle function

space and space travel really really wants to kill life

even Mars is going to be a one-way trip with very very short lifespan after that from all the radiation

really makes you appreciate Earth's protective atmosphere and magnetosphere (and gravity)

only clever idea I've seen is basically taking all the water you'd have to bring with you and turning it into a shield around the ship and using insane levels of recycling to maintain it

From a purely capitalist perspective it would make sense to protect the resource we have, knowing the technological obstacles to replacing it are virtually insurmountable. Earth is a non-fungible resource.

Things said before:

Humans will never see the edge of the Earth Humans will never fly Humans will never get to space

How dare you!

If up to me, I would put quotes on "humans", because we aren't and never were a static, unchanging thing. Without technology we did quite a bit of changing, and with it, especially at the present rate of acceleration, what stops us from slowly but surely changing the definition of human?

Take each reason supporting why humans cannot leave the solar system, and ask, over time, through obviously controversial modifications, why we couldn't mangle ourselves sufficiently to challenge each of these reasons.

And on the energy side, can we really predict that? We have government officials testifying on witnessing UAP, with a high probability that if they did really see anything at all, it was of human origin. Whatever that tech is, if we are not factoring it, then the "never" becomes a bit subject to questioning.

What is fringe today, and either taken for granted, dismissed, or simply overlooked, can quickly change, especially with colossal compute behind it. I often imagine how far we'd be if we actually gave that whole 'capitalism' thing a chance, without all the putrid patent slop, and other little complicating factors eg, Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 (35 U.S.C. §§ 181–188), 28 U.S.C. § 1498, etc, not to mention greed, monopolies, and dozens of equally formidable factors.

Even a subtle difference of governance can offer a subtle, but reasonable example of how development is effected by policy, as seen with China.