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But far before either of those happen we will have an increasing amount of either remote controlled robots or self guided robots exploring on the fringes before

• Zigurd 13y ago
  That's also true. And another reason to stay away from sci-fi inspired prognostication, like a lot of comments here where space ships five orders of magnitude heavier than anything yet built are blithely assumed to be possible. Most of it requires magical solutions to very hard problems. David Brin is one of the few writers i have seen take on the "it's really hard, and insanely expensive, to get anywhere" problem and make a story based on that problem. The most plausible future doesn't have animals that look like us running around in it, never mind traveling to other stars. And that makes it hard to sympathize with, or even imagine, the protagonists of stories about the far future.