Maybe better to start with a woman...

Actually, even something as primitive as a NSWR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket) can reach a good percentage of the speed of light after basically processing a comet for fuel. From the Wikipedia article:

"The design and calculations discussed above are using 20%-enriched uranium salts. However, it would be plausible to use another design which could achieve much higher exhaust velocities (4,725 km/s) and use a 30,000-tonne ice comet along with 7,500 tonnes of highly enriched uranium salts to propel a 300-tonne spacecraft up to 7.62% of the speed of light and potentially arrive at Alpha Centauri after a 60-year journey."

Sure, not 99% the speed of light or continuous 1 g acceleration but IMHO good enough for an oversized nuclear squirt gun.

Since we're already in the realm of far out engineering, you could get the energy from a laser beam from a source orbiting the sun. Your spaceship would have some kind of array to capture the energy beam.

This gives you energy, but I'm not sure how to turn that into velocity. Presumably you'd want some kind of ion beam emitter on board to propel your craft forward. Halfway through the journey, you'd turn the ion beam around to decelerate as you approach your destination.

In the Arthur C Clarke novel Songs of Distant Earth, spacecraft pushed huge blocks of ice ahead of them to absorb stray interstellar dust.

Less if we just send some eggs and sperm and spin up a human on arrival. We can construct a larger life support system out of things we find at the destination.

Or better yet, send some cancer cells so they can replicate during the journey, then switch from cancer mode to gamete mode for the final generation. That way they're fresh when you need them. You're gonna want DNA repair happening continuously, rather than all at once upon a thaw.

Yeah, I added that I think around the time you replied :)

Time experienced will be slowed down for the person in spaceship as you near lightspeed

This is using the fact that at 1g acceleration, one will quickly approach the speed of light relative to its starting rest frame and time dilation will give the astronaut a _very long_ life relative to that frame.

> Greek and Latin are still understood.

Nerds specifically kept the archaic forms alive, but they'd also tell you that Latin and ancient Greek were not static for their whole existence (Attic != Homeric != Koine), and modern Greek is somewhat different from what is taught as "ancient" Greek.

Treat Latin and (ancient) Greek like you would Quenya or Esperanto.

If this were to happen with English, I'd expect us to keep Chaucer, Shakespeare, and enough to understand Victorian literature, but it's anyone's guess if modern English would survive at all.

Arabic… kinda? It has an international standard form, but from what I've been told the language also comes with local dialects which can be difficult to mutually comprehend (though this is also the same with English just by going from central London to Sheffield).

I don't think that terrarium contains any animals.

The 'biosphere 2' attempt at building a self-sustaining environment with humans, did not succeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

Due to science fiction people tend to forget how miserable life in space is.

Nobody would chose to sacrifice themselves and their descendants (because that's what such an expedition is about), for mere curiosity. And nobody would fund an expedition that will not reach destination before multiple hundreds of years, even if the said expedition doesn't consume the entire industrial output of a major nation.

Space is BIG.

Most of the theories assume that aliens want to spread out as much as possible. But perhaps they are satisfied with a second star system as "backup"?

Maybe they even live inside asteroids or ships orbiting a dwarf star, because they are mostly in a Matrix-like existence and don't have much of a physical life?

If someone provided a matrix world where you could live your dream life, I think a lot of us would choose to live in it. It would be so much better than real life. Our physical bodies could be maintained by robots, providing us with the perfect mix of sustenance and physical exercise to increase our life spans. Your body would eat healthy, but your mind would experience whatever food you would like.

Yes, we don't know how to do that, but we don't know how to build hundreds of aircraft carriers per year right now either, yes the US has done the later in WW2 and would probably be able to do it again should it be needed in an existential war.

With a sustained nationwide effort comparable to WW2 we could most likely send a spaceship out if the solar system in ten years or so. But why would anyone do that?