Which era would you like to live in and why?

@UndeadPrivateer Cool! Long shot, though. At the speed of light we could reach Alfa Centori (sorry about my spelling) in approx. 4.3 years and find nothing but a lonely death.

@zhafar Far from a long shot, actually. There are multiple angles that make it highly viable. Simplest of which is generation ships or clones using current propulsion techniques and taking many decades or centuries to reach destinations and then preparing it for successive groups of colonists.

Assuming great advances in propulsion relativistic effects also just make interstellar travel [i]very[/i] viable, you just have to deal with some chronological weirdness. Primarily the fact that while the traveler will not experience much time passing, to those "on the ground" it will appear that much greater times have passed. To the traveler a few months may have passed but to the outside observer it has been decades or centuries. If we could travel [i]at[/i] light speed(physically impossible under current understandings of physics) then the travel would be functionally simultaneous to the traveler. Relativistic effects are something very commonly overlooked when discussing interstellar travel.

If we have actually been visited by et's, then they have circumvented time and space. I see the sense in your notions, though. I hope that it happens. Many, many obstacles. But I like your train of thought

@zhafar There's no need to circumvent anything. Relativity makes for quite the handy way of sidestepping the time constraints of interstellar travel through a nifty thing called the Lorentz Factor, though it does also mean that such trips will basically be "one way." When you return everyone you know and love that didn't go with you will likely be dead and everything radically changed. You just need some very efficient propulsion to get up to relativistic speeds, which is (very roughly speaking) anything in excess of 30% the speed of light.

@UndeadPrivateer "One way" is a given. We are generations away from launching a survivable craft achieving any significant faction of light speed. Most likely it will not happen. 7.3 billion mouths and assholes will see to that. We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction RIGHT NOW. Perhaps you will expand your studies of the science to incorporate the more mundane. We're not going anywhere when the oceans are one big algae plume, and the rain forests are gone, and the coral reefs are dead. No bio-diversity = no us. Chew on it. ( I mean that in a constructive way) I am not trying to 'one up' you. Rather, I implore you to employ your obvious intelligence to immediate realities.

@zhafar The immediate reality is that Earth is changing and we cannot stay here. But that solution isn't an interstellar one, it's an interplanetary one, and people [i]are[/i] actively working on that. I'd personally much rather be beyond this feudal and petty period of humanity we're in right now is the big point, which was what the question was asking about.

If we're doomed to extinction then so be it, the galaxy is probably better off. No one knows the future for sure though and what happens will happen, it'll probably be something far stranger than either of us have in mind.

We humans have great potential. Let us hope. I think the Moon would be an excellent lab for survivability in space, and a great jumping point. However, zillions of species have come and gone before we showed up. When we ponder the expanse of our Universe..... Many great civilizations have most likely come and gone. Some may coexist with us. The possibilities are astounding.I don't think we are a "flash in the pan", though I do despair at times. I dearly wish for a happy and fulfilling life for our children, so on, and on. It may be unrealistic, but that is why we harbor the notion of 'hope'.