I don't think so, at least not anytime soon...say the next 100-200 years.
There are many things that dictate this, the least of which is the technological issue of whether we can imagine ways to do it or not. All you have to do is look around you, and look at the trends in human behavior. We were on the Moon in the early 1970's, and then abandoned the concept of a lunar colony when we had the best economic and political opportunity to get one going.
Space exploration costs money, and it is the kind of investment that very few people now a days seem to feel is justified. We had the makings of a lunar base, and threw it away in 1972. I don't see us returning to the Moon or exploring the rest of the solar system in person, in my lifetime, or perhaps ever. How's that for pessimism? Mars might be the exception...but politicians still cant be convinced there is a very good reason for going there, given the probable cost of $40 billion.
Our best opportunity is to let unmanned interstellar probes and remote sensing from the ground or near-earth space, give us the most accurate picture of how things are in the rest of the universe. We can then create a Virtual Reality simulation of the whole shebang so that everyone on Earth can enjoy walking on the surface of Virtual Mars, rather than just a handful of lucky astronauts.
Travel to the stars is strictly out of the question for any number of technological reasons, to say nothing of the needs of society. Any human society that would underwrite such a journey, at the expense of what will surely be many trillions of dollars, would look nothing like any society that now exists on Earth today.
We laugh or marvel at the fortitude of the Egyptians who labored for decades and by the tens of thousands to build the pyramids and give their divine pharaohs a royal send off into the afterlife, but it is that kind of focus that a society would need to make star travel happen. We don't have it, because it would require focusing the wealth of this planet on that specific goal, at the exclusion of many others such as Global Warming and the decay of the biosphere and species diversity.
Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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