Originally Posted by Paul Markham

Man will be extinct or close to it long before we are exploring the Stars. We cannot sustain the growth we currently at. There is an 80% probability that world population, now 7.2 billion people, will increase to between 9.6 billion and 12.3 billion in 2100. Forget about feeding those people unless rain falls increase dramatically. At the moment fertile land is turning to deserts.

As for jobs, forget about that. Machines will do them.

The difficulties faced with building a vehicle that can carry people across Space, keep them alive, return them and us being able to pay for it. Are immense. Putting someone in a coma-like state for the time it takes to travel 40,208,000,000,000 km or 4.2 light years are immense. Especially if they're weightless.

We are at the point of building dugout boats and crossing the Atlantic in them.

Musk and especially people like Gates would do more good by giving free birth control pills to the billions still on Earth.

Sorry to bring you dreamers back to the real world.