Arguably, since less than 600 individuals have made it to LEO with 2 dozen going around the Moon, this doesn't translate to "spacefaring society." If only 600 people had cars among 8B, we wouldn't describe this as an automotive society. When thousands are regularly traveling outside the Earth-Moon system, then we will be spacefaring. Troubles are lowering the expense and having the practical incentive beyond discovery.
I suppose that climbing Everest never had any practical purpose, and an economy has developed around it. But still, cost per person is a fraction of $1M to do so. It costs an average of $58M/person to get to orbit and back safely for a short trip, and that is just LEO for a few days or maybe a couple weeks. Economies of scale may never materialize for space travel. Even if we do legitimately become spacefaring and stretch out into the Solar System for some reason, high costs and accidents may, like nuclear energy, cause it to scale back and diminish to its current state of roughly 50 people per year to LEO.
Without the incentive of profit, which I doubt tourism could sustain by itself, I don't see how spacefaring ever gets off the ground. Maybe mushrooms found on Europa become an insanely expensive delicacy, or similar. But it seems astronomically unlikely. If the profit incentive can be found, then it could not be stopped, but it really needs to do more than pay for itself, and at a current pace of sinking $20B/yr into it without a return, ever, who knows if it will ever even break even?
So, yeah, if you want to argue for "never", it's valid. It's just talking about delays that isn't.
(But somehow the "no large enough group - and it means 100 or 200 people - will ever want this" argument doesn't look reasonable either. We are talking about an empty ecological niche and a timeframe large enough for biologic kingdoms to appear.)
> But somehow the "no large enough group - and it means 100 or 200 people - will ever want this" argument
idk who argued that, but it wasn't me. My argument is economic. I didn't make it but would make further argument(s) basically that 1) it's insanely dangerous, and 2) there's nothing out there, which together is really the same risk vs reward argument that is notably top heavy with a wide spread.
This is false equivalence. Assume everyone wanted it to the maximum possible level of desire, and it is still possible that desire will be unfulfilled due to economics, namely, expense. You can't say of a home that someone can not afford means they did not want it badly enough. No matter how badly they want it, it is not possible for them to get it if it is beyond their means. Humanity may not be able to afford human-attended space exploration beyond LEO and, vanishingly rarely, the Moon simply due to expense no matter what the level of desire is.
Exactly as long trash the ecosphere - not coincidental.
> This will be a non-issue
I despair.