Let’s consider how an enterprising space-faring race might get their arms around the scope of their endeavor. What would be the minimum goal?
Expanding to the full extents possible, just in terms of travel, the goal would be to go anywhere one could desire in the universe. Honestly, that’s too big. I mean, you can write the words, maybe symbolically represent what that means, but really digesting this in a real way is generally impossible. Realistically, the human race may fade from the cosmos before achieving such a feat. It is the very definition of impractical.
Perhaps galactic travel then? A turn or two around the Milky Way? That’s a lot easier to comprehend, but it’s still a damn big volume to consider. Does the means to survey and explore the entire galaxy translate into human advancement? Not immediately, no. So that seems to far to plan.
What about the ability to visit the star systems in the nearest few parsecs. Now it’s beginning to resemble something like a trip we could take. Travel to Trappist-1 (12.3 parsecs) or maybe Sirius (2.6 parsecs), that approaches some credulity. Still, given where we are, that’s a big ask.
What about Alpha Centauri? That’s our nearest stellar neighbor at about 1.3 parsecs distance, or 4.4 light years. It seems the least we could attempt, right? However, you have to ask again, what’s there to see, what is the motivation to go there? Obviously, it’s the achievement. The mental and sociological impact of truly leaving the cradle. It’s important, and it’s my opinion that humanity will go there, and farther still. But the intrinsic value of going, in terms of resources, and of settlement, that justification is hard to discern.
There are indeed resources and places to live within our own Sol system, we can see them, we can in some cases occasionally touch them. Humanity could be well-served in branching out into our home system and kept productively busy in developing our future.
But escaping the system is still an alluring ideal. I’d even say it was a need. We need to go to Alpha Centauri, and to keep going. So I would say there are two very distinct phases of space development from the top down, when thinking of this as a Systems Engineering problem.
- First the Solar System
- Other star systems.
As I discussed earlier in RIPM Travel to the Oort Cloud, a mission could be designed around travel to and from the Oort cloud. This serves the need to travel the Sol system and it would also push our technologies to support longer future missions to other systems. The radius of the Oort cloud is somewhere around a light year, and is close to halfway to Alpha Centauri, though not quite. That puts our nearest neighbor at least on the horizon of possibility. It would be considered a stretch goal, with its mission definition dependent on the development and resulting character of the first mission to routinely access the Sol system.
So, here is the development of human spacefaring culture, from the top down:
