Say we found a fuel source on mars that was so energy rich it could undercut oil... then yeah that would lead to a radical revolution in human space exploration.
What we have now as far as i am aware is very little commercial incentive to really explore space, in this scenario space flight will probably advance very slowly.
There's this strange fixation with the ground (I usually attribute this to fear masquerading as a budget) and what's happening here, but I feel like there's a lot more out there if we seriously start looking. The kind of stuff that would eliminate the need for commercial incentive that we can't necessarily see now.
But we're here to convert heathens so they don't burn in hell. Why would we want to ever leave this puddle that, so obviously, was made just for us?
/tongue-in-cheek
Made me chuckle, thanks :)
It will probably be a few more generations before the human race starts to come around to the idea of figuring out why we're here.
Not within individual limits of time and scale. The Moon is a couple days away, but for all we've looked at it seems it's little more than a dead atmosphere-free rock. The next nearest place to walk is a couple years away. Both will require hauling an oppressive amount of stuff along to stay there long enough to achieve anything resembling self-sufficiency. The sheer scale of time & effort - balanced against payoff of any kind - is vast beyond human comprehension. "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..." [Douglas Adams] Travel time gets a lot longer the farther the destination. Between Mars and the next place we have any hope of surviving on is a very, very long distance. I remember when Voyager I was launched: decades later, we're arguing over whether it actually left the solar system yet. Yeah there's interesting things out there...but don't underestimate how very, very, very, very, very far away they are.
Oh sure, look hard enough and we'll find "something interesting", and perhaps come to grok "why we're here" - but at enormous cost to those who don't get to go. Sure you'll find a few people actually willing & capable to make the trip (stark raving boring as most of it will be, even with a Morale Officer), but those "orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude" more people needed to make it happen don't get enough out of their contribution to bother contributing, and ultimately it's their paychecks that will be "redistributed" to fund the effort. Firefly Alpha will cost (optimistically!) about US$10M to launch 1 ton into low orbit, with that cargo assured to return at least $10M revenue; if not for that payoff, those involved have compelling reasons to elsewhere route money which provides a good life for some 400 people ... how much then the human cost of sending a handful of people on a trip which, beyond a couple nearby rocks, would take a lifetime or far more?
TL;DR - very little of space is close enough and interesting enough to get to before you're dead.
There are a lot of not only interesting but also commercially viable things right here in our solar system. We have several huge balls of fuel, each of which has many orders of magnitude more energy that humanity has harnessed in our entire history.
There are planets that we can build on and adapt to, or potentially adapt to us.
There are millions of floating gold mines with more mineral riches than than exist in the entirety of earth.
Regarding the distances, I don't think they are as big as you are putting them out to be. If you look at the ratio of how far we need to travel to get somewhere interesting(moon, mars, comet, etc) over how fast we can travel( 36,000 MPH+) and compare that to the ratio of the European wind powered ships speed vs a trip to the new world, you'd see that the solar system is not at all outside of our reach and there are many precedents to speak to humanities willingness to make sure trips.
If you can make the trip financially profitable, go for it.
I think the real economic driver in the future will be mining resources from asteroids. Could be a trillion dollar market in the future.
[1]http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast...
We need an orbiting dry dock :)
On a side note,I think one of the simplest (but skillful and dangerous) jobs here on Earth that I would want in the age of space construction would be space welder.
There is such a fuel on the Moon. He3.
There are some where I think it will, for the foreseeable future, just because they're so rare in the Earth's crust and so plentiful in asteroids, but long-term, microgravity assembly plants are how things will go.