We are trapped in the solar system.

A thousand years ago it was unthinkable we could circumnavigate the globe.

We don’t understand quantum mechanics and we don’t understand gravity. There’s no reason to assume that we won’t find ways to travel the universe, e.g. by manipulating space time. We just don’t know what we don’t know.

If you had to bet based on past achievements, humanity will find a way. Our job is to push the limits as much as we can and build a foundation for future generations.

For the next 300-500 years, yes. But there is plenty of things to do, stuff to build and room to expand within a light-day from Sun.

Yeah, pretty much:

> It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it.

I once watched one of those videos that was a speeded up example of light leaving the sun and showing the time it takes to get to the various planets. It was boring as hell after just a couple of minutes and that's with light way speeded up. My conclusion is that "light is too damn slow."

until next "General Relativity" is discovered, and maybe we can get both voyagers back.

There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system.

When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside.

Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps. Earth life is nearly 30% the age of the universe and it took us this long to get here.

It'd be near impossible for aquatic life to have an industrial revolution without aqueous chemistry control. Can't do that when you're stuck inside water. It's also hard to evolve reasoning when you can't see far ahead. Little evolutionary pressure on reasoning over time and distance.

And it's hard to leave water. You need to evolve new eyes and lungs to live on land. And then you need an energy source like O2, which tends not to stick around.

So many reasons.

The distances of space are certainly one holding us back now.

Sandboxed. Yep.

Of course we are, but my question is why is that notable?

You also breathe a nitrogen-oxygen-hydrogen mixture, and have a body that is built to walk around at 1g on a planet between 0-100 degrees F.

That doesn’t seem to bother people.

I mean we have a way today to get to a fraction of light speed with the nuclear bombs for propulsion method. Technically it’s even survivable for a person.