And so we just tell everyone in the space agency "Sorry guys, but we can't do any more space stuff besides ground-based telescopes until we come up with a better propulsion system. So we'll keep about 100 of you on board to come up with that and the rest of you are fired."
Meanwhile, all of the derivative research (effects of zero gravity, life support systems, shielding, re-entry, etc) stagnates. And I guess we should dismantle our satellite systems as well, since they require rockets to achieve orbit.
Maybe we should ban all cars while we're at it, since they pollute our environment. We should shut down the evil factories, too, so no electric cars, either.
Yup, we can just sit in a circle, singing kumbayah while we wait for that miraculous perfect power source that someone else will develop for us. Then, and only THEN, can we continue with "progress".
Actually, it could happen with chemical rockets -- if we abandon the idea of sending canned monkeys beyond the atmosphere.
We can afford to send up a couple of hundred tons of prokaryotic spores every year until the cows come home, with solar sails to get their packages up above solar escape velocity. Over a few decades or centuries that's a lot of unicellular organisms to scatter on the direction of exoplanets; we can hope that in a few million years one or another strikes edible dirt and begins to reproduce.
This is, however, not as mythically resonant as "space: the final frontier" ...
Ethically speaking, sending non-sentient foreign organisms to an unknown planet that might already be inhabited falls somewhere between spamming and attempted genocide.
No, thanks. I prefer to believe that this task is what our intelligence is for.
I completely agree with you on the spamming point. But disagree on the intelligence side ...
Bacterial colonization is a useful argument for interrogating the "we must colonize spaaaace!" folks' intentions. I mean, why exactly must we colonize space?
"Before the sun leaves the main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram/the Earth is hit by a comet or irradiated by a GRB" is a meaningless argument. These events happen on a time frame of hundreds to thousands of megayears; while the mean life expectancy of a mammalian species is on the order of one to ten MYa, and for a hominid species like us, it's well under one MYa. These arguments don't hold water. Furthermore, we coevolved with our biosphere and we're really badly adapted to existence without a large subset of it: calling for human space colonization is implicitly a call for terraforming/transporting a viable terrestrial biosphere to other worlds. Which brings us neatly back to bacterial colonization, because that's part of the package deal.
While I can't refute the quasi-religious imperative implicit behind the rhetoric for space colonization, I wish its proponents would recognize that it's essentially a faith-based ideology!
Apart from the usual Manifest Destiny IN SPACE! crap, recently I've been a bit shocked to realize that there might actually be a point in trying to go to remote and harsh places.
The Antarctic being a barren wasteland makes it an attractive breeding ground for penguins precisely because it's so inhospitable to anything alive, penguins included. As long as penguins suck less at living in a barren wasteland than their predators it's a net benefit for them to be there, despite the hardships of the environment.
If we assume there is a group of humans that feel existentially threatened by other humans so much that odds of surviving in an irradiated subterranean Mars colony beat the odds of being exterminated here on Earth, it would be a perfectly rational choice for them to try and move somewhere out of reach.
There are lots of potential scenarios why such groups might come into existence, and not all of them involve outright genocide. For example, a group could form just as a result of concerned citizens wanting to go to some place very, very remote once kids start playing Pokemon with their newfangled RNA synthesizers.
There's no reason to believe chemical rockets can't get a small, self-sustaining colony going. Asteroid/comet mining, a Mars base, etc. are likely possible with current or near-current technology.
No, we're not going to move a billion or two people with them, but that's not what we need to make humanity multi-planet.
