Empirically totally untrue as to be trivially disproven by like half of wealthy social media.
> thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return
Everyone on these ships would be a celebrity on Earth. (Ideally, if they so chose.)
Again, a simple reading of one-way trip settler-explorers across history similarly rejects this notion.
> If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems
The first several of these ships are likely to end in catastrophe. The first to succeed will be breaking down on arrival. If we learn to build luxurious space habitats it will be through these endeavours.
A week in Bali is not the same thing as interstellar travel…
Are you genuinely unfamiliar with the folks who launch off on their own into the deep wilderness for years on end. Not only for vanity, but largely to do groundbreaking research?
Are you confusing "adventurer" and "explorer"? There are plenty of contemporary adventurers (motivated by ego, fame, personal achievement) but explorers? Not so much.
Anywhere that might sustain life is no closer than a couple thousand years away if we develop ultra-efficient almost magical engines that only bend the laws of physics instead of breaking them outright. Stuff like accelerating the propellent so hard that it picks up enormous amounts of relativistic mass, like every gram of propellant weighs effectively a ton because you've accelerated it so close to the speed of light, which requires some kind of ultra-dense power source that makes mere matter-antimatter annihilation look like burning a match.
We'd have to completely re-think industrial processes. I'm in favor of realized nanotechnology and 3d printers at an atomic level. Evolution stumbled across carbon based lifeforms as it's answer on Earth.
Isn’t this impossible? Doesn’t entropy preclude perfect ongoing repair?
Yes, but we don't actually need "perfect". Also: you can counter a lot of entropy from the energy supply of those engines.
Counter-but: we aren't even close to good enough for what we do need.
Why? If we can accelerate a small city to 0.01g in a year, we can accelerate smaller packages to catch up with it once a year.
The beauty of this setup is that if you are really good at keeping the schedule, this can be all pre-computed. With time slots being allocated beforehand when the laser arrays send beams in a given direction & the packages (or the craft itself) just making really sure they stay in the beam & properly oriented when it arrives at the planed place and time.
With exponential growth and the second law of thermodynamics, there’s no such thing as solving resource scarcity, only delaying it.
“The indefatigable spirit of exploration” isn’t the answer. People, as a mass, only explore to find new resources due to scarcity.
There are exceptions, but they tend to be thrill seekers or publicity hounds seeking to capitalize on a measure of fame upon their return and dying on a spacecraft 1/5th of the way through its journey isn’t thrilling and no ticker tape parades await your return.
If you can build a spacecraft capable of sustaining 1,000 human lives for multiple centuries, you’ve solved all local resource scarcity problems. You could just mine the solar system and build billions of habitats that lazily circle the sun.
Hell, you wouldn’t even care about habitable planets anymore and a likely endpoint for any interstellar efforts would likely be a long-lived star with large orbiting gas giants you could turn into solid materials in order to build trillions of habitats orbiting that star, not an insignificant earth-like boulder.
Imagine turning all of the methane in a gas giant into carbon strands, using its hydrogen to do it and building a near-infinite number of habitats, each perfectly suited to human existence.
An earth-like planet with its quakes and tsunamis and seasonal cycles would seem pathetic.