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Comment by xradionut | Hacker News Reader

"That's astounding. This is probably going to be one of our first destinations, when humanity starts building interstellar craft."

Not going to happen for practical physical and economic reasons.

I'd sooner bet on a mass extinction event or singularity than a bunch of greedy superstitious primates actually develop interstellar travel.

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Give those monkeys some respect please. Name any other species that have gone from walking around to flying in less than 100 years; gone from just barely flying to flying to the moon, walking there and flying home in 70 years; have completely eradicated a disease that killed millions of their numbers over the years (Smallpox); doubled its average lifespan; domesticated a competitive apex predator (Canus Lupes); build up a planet-wide network of invisible signals of lights such that a message can be send from one place on earth to the other in less time than it takes to say it out loud; build a bomb that can level a city - and used them as a basis for creating peace.

Yeah, we are not perfect, why would we be? We were the monkeys that were thrown out of the trees, that were forced out of Africa and into the icy Siberia and semi-cold Europe, we were the sure bet to lose and yet not only did we survive, we flourished.

> greedy superstitious primates

Press Release: Scientists found $VALUABLE_RESOURCE, making whoever gets there first the richest of all mankind, on $DISTANT_PLANET. Clearly, as God chose $OUR_PEOPLE, we must go there as soon as possible to fulfil his destiny.

(Now we just need to create some vast conspiracy to efficiently spread the message.)

Greed and superstition colonised America, Africa and Asia, lets people drive submarines to place their flag under the north pole and effectively made the human race the only race of remotely intelligent beings to live on all six continents.

OK, you need to watch some more Star Trek and get some optimism going ;)

I watched the last two ST movies and it just makes me want to see shit explode.

Everyone knows Star Trek films are terrible. :)

After 4 decades of reading/watching sci-fi, I've evolved to reality based entertainment. :p

Actually if you read John Barne's article on world-building,"How to Build a Future," where he talks about building the universe for the "Thousand Cultures" series, he discusses in detail the issues with local interstellar travel. (Since he has to plot around them.)

Also Star Trek is space opera, you probably should be reading hard sci-fi.

Hard scify is limited because is based on current knowledge. In 200 years thinks may have evolved quite a bit though. Maybe not to startrek standars, but something completely different that we can not imagine now(or that we can imagine but not give a theorem about).

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