sigh

I know we've still got 53 years - and 53 years before, say, jet fighters of 1950 humans hadn't even achieved powered flight. Nevertheless these predictions seem so unlikely to come to pass at any point in this century; it's as though we've been turning inward and merely marking time (or, more accurately, twittering and itunes-ing away time).

For comparison, 53 years ago in 1957, Russia launched the first man made object that could orbit the planet and all it could do was beep. Today, the Earth has hundreds of man-made objects orbiting it, including one that is manned. Every large body has or had a satellite orbit it or smash into it. It appears we have gone backwards because manned moon missions only lasted a few days and did not add much scientific data as a probe can. Putting people on other planets is expensive, keeping them there is much more expensive and complicated. While we could just keep sending people until we figure out how to keep them from dieing, it's much easier to send out probes and figure it out here on Earth.

Even though I could imagine an ISS-like international endeavor on the moon by 2063, everything else would be blatant overestimations. Sustaining purely scientific outposts further away than that would overstrain the financial ressources of, well, everybody one can think of.

Where it could be possible that by this time propulsion systems capable of accelerating to relativistic velocities are feasible, the notion of mounting manned interstellar missions equipped with them is ill-conceived. Assuming that the crew is still up and about and not irradiated corpses or pushed over the edge by years of isolation from their loved ones, what will they find within a radius of 40 lightyears? Nothing even remotely Earth-like, just systems consisting of suns and asteroid-sized bodies. Aside from scientific findings an unmanned probe would also provide there wouldn't be any benefits from such a mission, so why bother at all? Not until the discovery of how to construct self-sufficient habitats this would be sensible.

Sorry Liam, but to me your comments read just like someone in 1899 saying "certainly someday Man might achieve powered flight, but to what end, the speed would be less than a locomotive and the fragile wood and fabric plane could carry little more than it's pilot and a camera".

We know neither what scientific advances lie around the corner, nor how those advances might eviscerate our conceptions (and misconceptions) of what "might be".