The future of humanity is in the cosmos. There is no doubt about it in my mind. I don't feel this way just because science fiction movies or novels talk about it and portray it as humanity's destiny.

The reason why I think we are going to be a spacefaring civilisation is that we humans are natural explorers. We managed to spread throughout our planet and the next logical destination seems to be space.

There are a ton of planets, moons, asteroids and maybe even future large spaceships where we can potentially set up permanent settlements. There is so much out there that even if we kept exploring for hundreds of thousands of years, we would barely make a mark.

After our solar system, the next destination would be interstellar missions. That would be humanity's biggest challenge even after thousands of years from now when we become much more advanced than we are currently. But that's not stopping scientists to plan it in the present.

Manned Interstellar Mission

A team of scientists from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies recently revealed that they want to plan to send a crew of people to a planet in another solar system. Logically, it would belong to the nearest star from us, the Alpha Centauri system.

It is a system that is more than four light years away from us. That means light would take four years from our Sun to reach that system. That is a really long distance. So long, that it would take us at least a thousand years to reach there.

Such a long journey would mean several generations of humans would have to live and die on the spaceship, for centuries or millennia. It wouldn't be possible on any spaceship that we currently have. To make it possible, we would essentially need to build a spaceship that is at least as large as a small village with hundreds of people in it, so that they can keep procreating throughout the journey.

On top of that, there are many problems with space travel that we haven't solved yet. There are health hazards with travelling long durations in space, the propulsion systems that we have currently would take too long, the crew would need to grow their own food and procreate in zero gravity which has never been tested and much more.

Also, one important aspect is that, even if we send a large number of people in a large spaceship to the nearest star system, technology here on Earth would rapidly develop and within a century or two, we could have discovered/invented something that would let us cover the distance in no time at all! That means those humans travelling in that spaceship would have taken the journey for nothing!