Barely spacefaring. We are like fish on the shore who can survive in the mud long enough for the tide to come back to rescue us, if that.
Imagine that by some chance Mars was another Earth with a breathable atmosphere. NASA would have been given a trillion dollar budget and we would have been there in the 80s. Instead it’s a dead red rock so NASA gets a small budget and the US spends its money on blowing people up instead.
We have the technology to be a spacefaring civilisation but we won’t care until Earth becomes a worse place to be than the rest of the solar system, which is probably never given how bad the other bodies in the solar system are. Most likely we develop Von Neumann probes before we ever get bored of Earth.
Watching a planet which could retain water go from "nothing to oceans" would be amazing.
I'm not sure how that would get solved without some active technological solution by humans let's say.
It appears that at some point, somebody involved with this knew what they were doing. But we are removed so many steps from that person, that anything said there could as well be Star Trek techno-jumble. Including the conclusions.
Which is short in geological terms, but an eternity in technological ones. We would have plenty of time to solve that problem.
A significant difference of the solar gravitational lens from a conventional telescope is that the gravitational lens telescope is not in any practical sense pointable.
For the telescope at a distance F from the sun to be re-aimed to image a new target 1° away, it would have to move a distance of (π/180°)F, which is 10 astronomical units at the minimum focal distance-- a lateral distance equivalent to the distance from Earth to Saturn.
This means that, in practice, such a telescope is not able to be repointed.
Thus, a telescope at the gravitational focus is necessarily going to be a singlepurpose telescope, with the target of observation selected before the mission is launched.
A gravitational focus mission can’t be used as a telescope to search for a target: such a mission must be with the objective to observe a target whose position is already known.
Geoffrey A. Landis, NASA John Glenn Research Center
https://www.nasa.gov/general/thin-film-isotope-nuclear-engin...
> The basic concept is to manufacture thin sheets of a radioactive isotope and directly use the momentum of its decay products to generate thrust.
Actually it's mentioned at the end of the article:
> Novel ability to reach deep space (> 150 AU) very quickly and then continue aggressive maneuvers (> 100 km/sec) for dim object search/rendezvous and/or retargeting telescopes at the solar gravitational focus over a period of years.
It doesn't scale well. The probe would be able to observe a carefully chosen extrasolar planetary system in the opposite direction in relation to the sun. If you want to observe a second system, it's necessary to launch a second probe 550 AU in another direction. You can't change targets just by rotating the probe, given its lens is the sun.