Comment by bandrami
I've always thought that people pushing for colonization or even commercial exploitation of space simply don't have a good sense of how far things are and how empty the space between us and those things are.
I've always thought that people pushing for colonization or even commercial exploitation of space simply don't have a good sense of how far things are and how empty the space between us and those things are.
That has always been the case, there is loads of empty distance between big population centers even today there are big cities many hours by flight from anywhere else of interest.
In the age of sail, people were perfectly willing to spend months in transit .
Transit times for most objects of commercial interest (i.e. upto moons of Saturns) is only in years if you use a low energy/Delta-v Hohmann transfer orbits and/or gravity assists as is common today for probes.
Direct transfer would be expected for human transits , those can be fairly quick . Transfers to mars within the next 1-2 decades is doable in 6months or less.
There are no fundamental breakthroughs needed to go any orbits we would be interested in 1 year or less by end of this century.
On the other hand I do agree going interstellar is a whole different scale of empty and without near light speed (even with ) is probably out of reach .