TLAM,
The voyager drones are primitive, and the distance they have passed does not impress me at all. To use my metaphor from the beginning: they have made one small step closer to the still distant beach that is some kilometers behind. Still no water in sight.
The distances out there are HUGE. I mean: REALLY REALLY HUGE. Bigger than human mind can imagine. We can only handle it abstractly, via mathematics. What the numbers in reality mean, we cannot imagine. We have no idea. That abyss out there is impossible to grab for the human imagination.
A life in space and surrounded by technology and steelwalls, I think you underestimate the psychological and physiological basis which man, as creatures of Earthly nature and with a genetic heritage, cannot leave behind so easily. After all we are still animals wanting to run freely over a planet's surface and with an oipen sky above us. Many of our civilisatiopnal mental and psychological diseases derive from us forgetting this origin of ours.
Everything starts with a first step, right, and I did not say it never will happen. It'S just that I said: in some centuries. I think it will take much more time then you seem to imagine, and I think we do not have that time. It also takes more than just technology. It probably will need a genetic and physiological alteration of ourselves, of our genetic code.
I tend to say that technology is part of the way the former exclusively
biological evolution of man works to let him alter the design path of the homo sapiens project. It enables us to reach where we would not reach woithout technology, and to live where without terhcnology we would not be able to live. It has an evolutionary meaning for us. But still, the developement is not without inner contradcitions, like we still are not fully adapted to walk upright and thus suffer typical health probolems from our movement appararus that derive from that. We are even less adapted to the integration and the repsonsible, non-suicidal use of technology. And technology also still has not the solid quality and robustness and reliability that we should base the survival of our species on it, blindly. Today we have between 600 and 1200 tehcnical microfailures inside cockpits of modern airliners, due to the many CPUs in there. Most of these events are so small ins cale that threy even do not get noticed. Sometimes they get noticed, and sometimes planes fall out of the sky. And this is in a lame and tame envrionment wihtout the harsh storms on mars and without cosmis radiation, micrometeorites, extreme temperatures differences and so on and so on.
Then there is the currently lacking transportation capacity, both travel between sky objects like Earth, Moon and Mars, and then from orbit to Earth, and the other way around. Both for mining on the moon as well as forming huge spacecraft and extraterrestrial habitats, huge payloads need to be lfted and moved. By design our current industrial and economical and techcnical potentials simply cannot afford and cannot imagine how to do that. So here again, a massive quantum leap in the way we arrnage the life of many people in societies and tailor industrial supply systems arround them, need to be redesigned: again we need toi start doing homework on earth, not start with thinkling about space first.
TLAM; I think you are a prime candidate for a German meganovel of almost 1000 pages that a German bestseller auhgtor has published two years ago or so, the novel is called "Limit" and is by Frank schätzing whom i have recommend before for his thriller "The Swarm". Schätzing did all the stuff that you seem to like: he took trend sof present technology, for example the new Google glasses, anbd extrapolates them on basis of current engineers' statements to a level they likely will reach within the next future in around 15-20 years, if the world goes optimal. He describes how private business has taken over space travel industries and made them more potent then NASA ever could have been. He describes how the first Luna hotel got build, how a rivaly between Russian, Chinese and American space industries could look like, how orbital lifts solve the problem of moving huge payloads between orbit and Earth'S surface, and mining gets done by huige robot fleets on moon. It is science fiction, but not typical, it is more an attempt of a - I admit: over-optimistic - reasonable speculation on how present technology can end up to be used in the forseeable future if in man's world all things suddenly go smooth and well. Embedded is a thriller and crime story of sabotage and spying, assassins and flying hover bikes that do air battles.
Entertaining read, and maybe right the stuff who have on mind.
BTW, plans to bring a man to Mars there have been since the 70s. According technology - if accepting the risks of it - we have since the 80s, it was said. By the late eighties and early nineties, a man could have been on Mars indeed. Why did it not happen? Profanities like money. Lacking interest. Politics, and refocussing on other things closer to home. What did Ju said so irresistably? "Making money, breed like rabbits, muddle through".
It will remain to be likme that for long time to come. And probably until it is too late. So again, I do not say all these highflying plans and visions could not become real one day, maybe. I only say it will take much much more time than optimists imagine. And probably more time then we have. Ifd on Easrth we fall back into a state wiothout national and cultural organisaitons, if our natiosn fall apart and we move around in tribal groups and maintain only small local industrial hotpsots possibly, you can forget about efforts needed to run programs capable to bring a signbificant ammount of people into space and onto other planets, build them habitats, and enable them to live and survive there in autarky.
Another thing I just thought about
: medical problems of chnaged gravity. The degeneration of muscles, the changes in cardiovascular system, and skeleton, chnages in metabolism and physiology and indocrinology. We understand by now that these chnages are real, and can only be slowed - they cannot be prevented so far, and they all tend to reach potentially dangerous, lethal status sooner or later. You can send an astronaut into the spacecraft's gym daily, but this only slows down these changes - it does not prevent them.
BTW, is the ISS considered to be in a build state close to "finish" now or are they still doing construction work on it?
And constant maintenance, with a constant flow ofd items materials coming from Earth? How many years did it take to get it to where it is now? Was it ten years to build it so far, or already longer? - And no, not for a million dollars I would fly in that thing to Mars.
A week ago or so I linked to that huge Mars panorama picture NASE has glued together from 800 single photos. Nice job. But the sight of it left me with a feeling of - isolation,. loneliness, and very very massive deillusionising. Not even in the Sahara I felt like that, and that was the most lonely place I ever experienced. But that image from mars was imply - bleak, dismal, dreary. And UNINTERESTING. By that image I say there is nothing that could attract me to wanting to live up there in a tiny artificial habitat. That'S like life in a prison cell. Just that in prison you see somethign outside the window, assuming your cell has a small window. Up there you see - nothing. It's one thing to make one trip to the moon and return. Or to dive to the bottom of the Marianen abyss, and some hours later return. Going to Mars and live there - that is something completely, totally different.