Interstellar travel (was: Not that I WANT to terraform Mars...)

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To:
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 2:45 AM
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Not that I WANT to terraform Mars...

I can't help but think that interstellar travel will be viable before
terraformation is. Not that BOTH will nessesarily be impossible
forever.
[snikt]

Well, I really don't know. If someday some faster-than-light propulsion
system (warpdrive, wormhole, whatever) is invented, which I much doubt,then
I think that interstellar travel will be viable. Otherwise, I think that we
will just send interstellar automated probes, but never manned interstellar
ships, to nearby stars.

Still, I think that inevitably people will colonize other planetary systems,
even though they will never get aboard interstellar ships. How that can be
possible? It is simple: people just have to colonize the trillions of comets
of the Oort Cloud. Then, someday, hundreds of thousands of year in the
future, another star will get close enough to the Sun so that its cometary
cloud will intersect with the solar one. Then, people living at the Oort
Cloud will be able to migrate to the extrasolar comets making an
interplanetary-scale trip, no different from the journeys between solar
comets. The other planetary system gets colonized, and then when it
"collides" with yet another star system, the cycle repeats, leading to a
very, very slow "chain reaction" that eventually will populate the whole
galaxy (after a few hundreds of million years)... I saw this method as
described by Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", but I think that it was imagined
by someone else long ago.

Lucio Coelho