i suspect you don't work in the sciences, or as an engineer, b/c you would pretty much suck at it.
We would have advanced nowhere if humans always thought as you did.
that, and your first two points are already made worthless due to theoretical possibilities (the prospect of raising at least 1 generation in pace, during travel; and either a massive store of fuel, not exactly dangerous, or the development of new energy technologies, which is certainly not happening...at all
)
1. At C we could get across our galaxy in 100,000 years. OUR GALAXY! Our tiny speck of a galaxy out of billions of them. The next nearest galaxy is several time further away than our galaxy is wide. They are all accelerating away. Unless we find a way to make cosmic shortcuts possible, or make mass exceed C, we will never go anywhere very far really. The prospects of either are dismal.
2. We basically just cancelled manned Moon and Mars mission within our lifetime. Alternate means of propulsion will all be the slow infinite acceleration type because we don't want to drag so much juice around, using most of the energy produced to move the fuel itself. These types of craft won't carry much fuel, but will take eons to get up to a reasonable speed. Oh yeah, none of them are expected anytime soon.
3. We can't even prove wormholes exist much less open one wide enough to travel through. Even if we could, quantum mechanics suggest we can not predict where it goes. Opening one to a reasonable size presents the same energy requirement problem as attaining C, infinite energy would be required.
4. Trips would be one-way. No reports of anything will ever come back in a lifetime or even several thousand, so even if someone managed to get half way across the galaxy, we would never hear about it.
5. We are pretty decent at getting to the planets in our own solar system, but even then we require to wait, sometimes years) for perfect windows to get gravity assists from planets like Jupiter. Calculating the route to distant starts would require knowledge of all massive objects along the way, most of which we can not see. We can't even see into the Kuiper belt very well. Let's not forget that what we see is where something was X years ago. The exact vector of a distant star can not be calculated with any precision. This will not change anytime soon.
6. Space is bad for you. Zero gravity and radiation make space very unhealthy for astronauts. Not to mention humans do not do well in cramped quarters. Remember the Biosphere II people? They pretty much wanted to kill each other after a short time. NASA worries about this problem more than any other when thinking about going to MARS! That trip is only 6 months one-way max.
7. The same problems will exist for any other intelligent life.
8. It is thought by smarter people than me, that the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe range from zero to in the billions (based on the Drake equation). even at the upper bound, that is very few intelligent civilization per galaxy (less than .01). Why would they come here. The sheer odds say they won't.
9. I can say with some certainty that "You"r (biological at the very least) life will end within the next 100 years. The odds of you going anywhere, or anyone coming here during your lifetime are virtually nil.
10. The points I made about machine intelligence and miniaturization are base of others' ideas. Simply stated they are thus: humans have evolved to this point through biological processes which take millions of years. The hallmark of human evolution is sufficient intelligence for abstract thought. A result of this is that we have been able to better our chances of survival and our capabilities in total, with technology. This is basically taking charge of our own evolution. The next logical step is to accelerate our evolution by integrating with our thinking machines. This will give us several advantages, including longer life span, networked intelligence, and the ability to design bodies to travel the universe in (or anywhere else). At this point we will no longer care about the time it takes to get somewhere. Other sufficiently advanced intelligent life forms will come down the same path. information density is expected to be many orders of magnitude higher by then, so our bodies won't have to be large, in fact they would be far more efficient in small sizes. 1,000,000,000 human brains in 1cm^3.
This one goes to 11. I am just parroting the above from the collective wisdom of scientists whose job it is to make such conjectures. I'm sure my skepticism precludes me from having anything to do with science...
As far as does other life exist, I think it exists everywhere. I think we don't understand 1/1,000,000,000 of the things there are to understand about life. There could be life in the heart of the Sun for all we know. Each time we thought we knew anything, life surprised us. I suspect it will continue to do so.
I also suspect that some day life from different parts of the universe will meet up. It will just be a long time from now, and will require a universe literally saturated with intelligence. So I think you have me mistaken somewhat here, so put your little straw man away and elaborate as to why you think I'm wrong.
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