Here I think aging is far easier to tackle. Aging is a discrete set of biological processes that we understand more every day. The bounds we need to make in science are not so extreme to defeat aging, a process we have a pretty good view on now. Interstellar travel requires significantly more leaps. Light speed travel, or some big fraction of light speed [and slowing down from light speed]. It requires a huge amount of engineering and physical resources to even contemplate. It will take a concerted effort by a nation state. Aging is something that can be tackled collectively by the nations of the world, and just gets better understood every year naturally. Just spit balling this some, but that's roughly how I see it breaking down
>It will take a concerted effort by a nation state.
It will take a concerted effort by our species. Just as you go on to say that solving aging would require multinational support, why would you limit interstellar travel to a single nation?
The fastest way for us to become space voyagers would be for us to receive that signal from somewhere near Vega that tells us how to build the machine to take us places.
Well I don’t limit it on purpose. But the idea of nations cooperating right now seems a little in the future. Whereas with aging, science will just naturally progress. No changes required to the current cooperative structure. It just happens because that is how science goes. Space is just much more political than biology.
yea exactly, we are naturally incentivized to cure aging.
With about 10% of the worlds GDP spend going to healthcare you'd expect us to get there eventually.
Right now the voyager is traveling at 17 km/s which is 0.0056% of the speed of light. We don't have the propulsion technology and given the known laws of nature, it's unlikely we will ever have something feasible to travel at 10% of light speed. But even if we did manage that we'd be looking at 100 years of travel for a one-way trip.
