>We got to the moon, Mars, and several other solar system bodies
You're conflating humans and probes, which are vastly different.
I disagree. Robots can build infrastructure far ahead of human settlement, such that everything already exists when we are ready to travel.
We can also potentially re-engineer our own life form, or create an entirely new inorganic lifeform, to withstand various conditions, including radiation and a wider range of temperatures. That will be our successor.
We are only beginning to understand genetics in the past decade. We have a long, long way to go, and a lot to understand. Science is still at its infancy.
Also, this is something I could never say in an academic context, but deep down I don't believe in conservation of energy, partly because the big bang itself violates it. Yes, I would be ridiculed for saying this in a scientific context, but so would someone in the 1500s for saying that the Earth goes around the sun. I think at some point in the distant future we will not be reliant on stars as our energy source.
If you truly do not believe in the conservation of energy, I think we're done here since none of my arguments will be good enough for such wild speculation.
Human bodies suck because they need to eat, need to poop, complain if what they eat isn't tasty, fight with each other, and get cancer, but our legacy as intelligent life doesn't need to continue in our current carbon-based meat bag form.
This reads like an ungrad astronomy major fever dream.
I do think it’s possible that our best hope for navigating the transition beyond the singularity involves transplanting our humanness to another kind of life form. I’m not necessarily talking about uploading… more about a staggered intergenerational transition mixed in with life as we know it. I realize that to some people, this will continue to sound like crazy talk, until one day it isn’t. It’s ok if you are one of those people :-).
Yes, it reads like a dream. Technological breakthroughs of the past were created by people with dreams, not by skeptics.
Let's say it takes ~8 minutes to get to LEO vs 4,380 minutes to get to the Moon. That's a factor of ~550x longer flight time for a distance 2000x further.
Alpha Centauri is 1500x further away than Mars. It currently takes ~7 months to go from Earth to Mars (at 25,000 mph), assuming similar scaling that comes out to only 400x the flight time, or just about 230 years.