Comment 20 by Capt. Bloodeye :

The comments here display a pedestrian lack of imagination. Not too long ago the top authorities declared that it was impossible to fly, travel at over 20mph etc etc etc. Paradigms will shift, impossibilities will become matter of fact. Does anyone here really think that looking at the potentials of our existence from our current primitive state of technology is all inclusive?

I would not call it a lack of imagination to declare interstellar travel impossible for humanity. It is pretty much a fact. It is more of a lack of imagination to take some old technological advances as examples and believe they can be extrapolated as any serious prediction of the future. It's like comparing supersonic travel to superluminal, quite silly actually.

Interstellar travel requires amounts of energy and resources so far beyond anything our species can ever achieve that it is not even science fiction, it is harry potter-like fantasy. There is hardly enough matter in our solar system to convert to the energy needed. Let alone surviving the cosmic radiation or any other kind of life support.

Then again, some nanotechnological probes might some day be a possibility. But if living creatures were to travel across interstellar distances, they wouldn't be called homo sapiens. They would have to be genetically so much modified from us that they would have to be another species altogether. Even then it is questionable whether it is possible for any kind of life to make it through such vast amounts of lethal emptiness.