No!!! There is absolutely, 100% no roadmap for interplanetary space travel, certainly outside the solar system. (Within the solar system is arguable): the 7 pl

No!!! There is absolutely, 100% no roadmap for interplanetary space travel, certainly outside the solar system. (Within the solar system is arguable): the 7 planets just discovered are a good example, I love this comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13707775 "If you had a near perfect hydrogen -> helium fusion engine, it'd take about 6 million tons of fuel (about the mass of the Pyramids of Egypt or 2,000 Saturn V rockets)". Does this sound like a roadmap? "If you had a near perfect hydrogen-> helium fusion engine"... "mass of the Pyramids of Egypt"? Contrast this with the hardware I'm talking about: by my estimation there are 1,000 clusters today, today, that can run the appropriate software if we had it. The idea that someone would call it "impossible" at a time when conventional human thinking challenges such as playing Go, are being mastered by machine using machine learning, seems crazy. I absolutely do not agree with you that we have any roadmap for interplanetary, certainly extrasolar, travel. Contrast this with the Human brain. We can count the neurons (100 billion or so). It uses as much energy as a 20 watt lightbulb[1] but doesn't have light-speed interconnects, unlike server rooms. The roadmap we are following, simulating neural nets on bigger and bigger hardware, is pretty much the exact thing you'd expect us to be doing. It's yielding amazing results in machine learning. Why would anyone think that the biological, slow-firing chemical analog process these huge, super-fast digital processes replicate, will be out of reach literally "forever". It is literally possible that not one human being will ever travel outside the solar system - not in the next 1,000 years; 5,000 years; or ever. The idea that we will "never" simulate a hundred billion analog neurons running at 20 watts seems childishly naive. It seems like saying "no machine will ever fly - period" when machines are already doing more than enough work to do so. Come on. Anyway I am really interested in stochastician's answer here - this is why I wrote them after they offered to answer any questions ("appy to answer questions."). [1] 20 watts