The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.
So don't worry, maybe someone will blip us out of existence someday.
This is the key. On interstellar scales, things move very, very slowly and you have to plan on time scales measured in millennia. IMHO we are doomed simply because we can barely think beyond the next election cycle. (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)
And yet, without any central planning or coordination, we left Africa and colonized Europe, then we headed out across Asia and crossed into the Americas. Plus we sailed from Asia and colonized Polynesia.
Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly--it's going to take a thousand years to get to the southern tip of the Americas." And yet, we did.
I think the same thing will happen with space travel and ultimately the colonization of the galaxy.
I think I may not have made myself clear. The analogy here is not that "we're doomed because people walk slowly". There is nothing that happens here on earth that is even remotely analogous to the constraints that the speed of light imposes on interstellar processes. Even at a leisurely walking pace, a human can circumnavigate the planet in less time than it takes light to reach the nearest star. Human walking speed is blindingly fast (relative to the size of the planet) compared to the speed of light (relative to the distances between stars).
The reason we're doomed is not that we're not walking fast enough, it's because we won't stop walking and take time to think about where we should be going. We just go.
We weren't doomed then and we're not doomed now. We will colonize the solar system and eventually the galaxy.*
* Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance.
Yeah, well, there's yer problem right there. We will not colonize the solar system, and certainly not the galaxy, because we haven't figured out how to stabilize the situation here on earth. Yes, we colonized the planet, but for most of the history our lack of planning was compensated by technological limitations and limits imposed by the laws of physics. Those are mostly gone now, and I'll be a little surprised if civilization doesn't collapse before the end of my life (and I'm in my 60s). I would be very surprised if it lasts to the end of the century, though of course I won't be around to see that.
And not even all of us said that. The majority may have even stayed just a small group probably said “we’re going to check out what’s beyond that hill”.
I was surprised by this, but the math checks out (assuming you mean the nearest star other than the sun of course). The circumference of the Earth is about 40000km, at a leisurely pace that's 10000 hours or about 400 days. Proxima Centauri is about four light years away, so the walker has plenty of time for sleep and sight seeing.
I'm strictly an amateur--my professional life is software engineering. But I have written a few things that may or may not be to your taste:
A Very Short History of Humanity: https://neurohack.com/earthguide/History.html
And if you're into astronomy, you might enjoy my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591935571/
I am working on a sci-fi novel, but I'm only half-way and it's not that good so far.
A too-large portion of the population is incapable of learning from something that didn't happen to themselves directly, a smaller subset will even outright deny the existence of things that don't happen to them. Another half the population still believes in ghosts.
The Chinese political system is just as short-term-oriented as <insert democracy here> on the whole, and I don't think there has ever been a politician in history who ever thought about workable century-long impacts.
Well, the US political system is based on a four-year cycle. In China they're based around a five-year cycle. 25% longer.