I'm a moron.

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Just off the top of my head though....we would need something like 75,000 years with current technology to get anything to the next star system.

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We don't have the technology to withstand the radiation we'd encounter.

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We don't have the technology to keep our ships from being completely destroyed because they happened to run into a pebble in deep space.

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I don't know how we'd have the space for soil, seeds, water, food, clothes, spare parts and literally everything else you'd need on a long journey through space. How long could a ship even last in space before it just naturally erodes? Surely a ship flying through space, even with minimal life support and navigational functions, would need some maintenance over the course of several thousand years?

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Or....and I know this might be silly....but can you imagine, we send some lumbering ship with a skeleton crew of comatose people, unarmed no less, out into the cosmos and encounter some other intelligent beings. Can you imagine what would go through some advanced aliens minds seeing our primitive shit go floating by with a bunch of unfortunate souls strapped in for the next 50,000 years?

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To even try to answer this question I feel like we'd need to know what the scientific community thinks is a reasonable amount of time to get from point A to point B with a reasonable amount of resources and what hazards we'd need to deal with along the way. At least the ones we know about.

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Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me, as a moron, that we barely know what's floating around space beyond the Oort cloud as far as small shit we could run into and be destroyed by in a ship. It also seems that space is much denser than previously thought so just flinging ourselves in a straight line from one star to another is probably going to be way too risky to ever be a proper way to travel through space.

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I wouldn't be surprised that if we ever do reach an age where deep space travel becomes common and "easy" we'll have proper charts through space to make the ride as smooth as possible much like we do when navigating anything else.

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True generational ships though? I feel that chances are far more likely that we'll never end up doing that. At best, we probably do some space mining locally, colonize a few moons or mars and maybe....maybe find some primitive life on one of Saturns moons or something.

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I kind of doubt humanity is ever going to send a manned craft to another star. Probes, probably. We'll probably at least launch them.