I sometimes think the answer is both boring and sad: everybody is just really, really, unimaginably, far away.
Even if we manage to continue for another 10,000 years without causing our own extinction, will we come up with anything capable of moving people even 10% of the speed of light? If we do, will we bother to go to the stars?
That. Why did I have to scroll down so far to find exactly what I was thinking all the time?
I mean, I absolutely love Asimov and Mass Effect but they are entertainment stuff. The distances we are talking about here seem to be completely beyond everyone's mental reach.
Even if we could upload ourselves into spacepods like Kurzweil suggests (or for that matter could just UDP our souls out into space) we would not break the speed of light - which makes interstellar travel possible but only in a very constraint range feasible. Plus the problem that during the four years it had taken me to get to Proxima Centauri, humanity on earth will probably have seen centuries pass...
Even if we manage to continue for another 10,000 years without causing our own extinction, will we come up with anything capable of moving people even 10% of the speed of light? If we do, will we bother to go to the stars?