alt Hacker News> More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best
This is the key. On interstellar scales, things move very, very slowly and you have to plan on time scales measured in millennia. IMHO we are doomed simply because we can barely think beyond the next election cycle. (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)
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50,000 years ago (or so) we were a tiny species hanging out in Africa. We didn't think in terms of years, much less decades. This was before we figured out how to measure the length of the year or to predict when the winter would end.
And yet, without any central planning or coordination, we left Africa and colonized Europe, then we headed out across Asia and crossed into the Americas. Plus we sailed from Asia and colonized Polynesia.
Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly--it's going to take a thousand years to get to the southern tip of the Americas." And yet, we did.
I think the same thing will happen with space travel and ultimately the colonization of the galaxy.
> (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)
The Chinese political system is just as short-term-oriented as <insert democracy here> on the whole, and I don't think there has ever been a politician in history who ever thought about workable century-long impacts.