Space travel within the next 100 years

Well, certainly it’s only taken us one generation to get from where there are no space craft at all, to where we have permanently occupied low Earth orbit. We will never see another second when all people are back on the planet as I forecast. We have new rocket technology coming along that does not rely on chemical energy, of burning two elements together to make a propulsion. That would require a nuclear reactor, or better a fusion reactor. Fusion is going to have its first instantiation in the south of France, they are building that reactor now in Cadarache, and so I believe that probably 20 years from now we’ll have a power reactor on the ground and probably another 20 or 30 years from there we’ll have a fusion drive in space. And so it will probably take us most of the century to get outside of the solar system. Leaving our star and going somewhere else is such a long voyage, that I think probably for a couple of centuries, we will content ourselves exploring Mars, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and probably just around the solar system with unmanned vehicles. And I suspect we will spend a lot of time on the asteroids. But two centuries is really a blink of the eye in human destiny. It’s only just a few generations. And then from there on I think we will start to look like the folks portrayed in Star Trek.