Lol, huge is an understatement. Just to get to Pluto with our current technology would take many, many years of living in a spaceship. That is of course assuming nothing goes wrong such as system failure, collisions and running out of fuel. To actually get to the end of our solar system however, is a different story.
Our solar system i have read(if i remember rightly) is FAR larger then merely Pluto. there is alot of extra space to cover before we actually exit the solar system. Then there's the hard part. Travelling to another solar system. We are talking billions of miles(not sure how lightyears are worked out) to reach somewhere else.
Then you have to take into account finding another species that is sentient on on a suitable planet. The odds of finding that are so remote to happen its almost inconceivable. Of Course there is a good chance there is other life out there, just the chances of us finding it in space are almost nil. Even if we got hold of 'faster then light travel' it would still take decades..even centuries to get anywhere...
All in all, we are gonna be alone in space for quite some time, no matter how fast we go.
That's why I say its ridiculous to worry about or even look that far into the future...it'd be great if some genius somewhere were to invent something or we somehow obtained the technology to put this into practice but the reality of it is where a long, long way off from anything of this nature.
I'd much rather have 'us' as a species taken care of first then investing billions of dollars in something that is anything but certain...
And I'm not even going to waste time on you endersblade, all I meant by that is 'keep things in perspective', its easy to waste your life on a hapless pursuit like this...but hey, to each his own I guess. And I'm pretty sure Pluto lost its status as a planet...just a hunk of floating rock.
[Edited by Jackal, 1/21/2009 1:44:15 PM]
Maybe we dont have to be There..
maybe we just have gain the technology to kinda...put a sort of 3D solar system to our earth and zoom in on planets or so
I like this idea more than actually going there. Because it means you can experience other worlds and not deal with the bother of going there and then coming back, which would take a long time.