There are so many science fiction scenarios with faster-than-light travel for exploring and settling the Milky Way and other galaxies that one can lose track of realistic paradigms for explorations. The speed of light is the speed limit for anything with mass; nothing can travel faster or even more practically, nothing can travel anywhere near that fast because of relativistic limits. The opposite scenario most take is that humanity won’t ever travel more than 5 or 10 light years from Earth because of the time even that would take. There is a more realistic middle way though.
Humanity might well reach half of the speed of light with one of several forms of powering gradual acceleration of a space ship. Human travel to other star systems need not occur even within a human lifetime. At half of the speed of light reaching the other side of the galaxy yet not going through the dangerous congested galactic core region might require a quarter of a million years. That is about the same period of time that has passed since human beings became fully human. Future human population of the galaxy begins with a single step as the saying goes. With patience and frontier settlements they might take even two or three million years to venture out even to distant galactic arms traveling just at half the speed of light.
A small step for man and a giant leap for mankind began the thousand mile journey; or more accurately the 52,000 light year journey across the diameter of the Milky Way. Humanity may reach nearby Proxima Centauri and learn to hibernate for longer voyages of up to a 100 light years or more and create settlements. In modest increments traveling at half of the speed of light humanity might evolve pioneering settlements that would fill the galaxy with populated worlds in a million years or two. The species not be so pessimistic or fatalistic about its prospects even though it hasn’t even the capacity to settle conflicts with other means than war at the highest level of political leadership (in the United States at least). The Ukraine war could be concluded by sharing that borderland area between the rival claimants and ensuing peace would prosper each.
There are of course numerous potential challenges to exploring and settling the Milky Way even as there were in the evolutions of the human race out of Africa and to the western hemisphere of Earth. Alien species making their own journey may contact and clash with humanity at some point of the journey. Religious cults of war-like disposition may appear to war upon humanity in order to bring the race under political totality. Artificial Intelligence projects may arise to search and destroy sentient biological life. Loss of faith in God could generate a terrible species malaise and despair in a chasm of existential meaninglessness. Scientific discoveries could accidentally bring about the end of a galaxy or universe in one quantum exploding or disintegrating event. Maladaptive political economy on Earth may render the world ecosphere uninhabitable before exploration gets beyond the solar system. Racial conflicts may divide demographics on Earth and stimulate war even though the comparatively minor racial yet valuable difference between human races will pale to insignificance in comparison to unimaginable variegated human adaptations in forms in micro-gravity, in artificial habitats and on new worlds with different stellar distances, gravity strengths, atmospheric mixtures and so forth. The different human racial adaptations to environmental challenges are more of a strength than a weakness as the human race advances through billions of star systems. Yet with many risks and challenges humanity will trudge on.
After the fact is realized of creating faster-than-light travel, if ever that occurs, at that point, and only then would it be practical to plan explorations missions on a grander scale. The likeliest means would be to discover how quantum entanglement and information super-positioning works. Perhaps the entire universe of mass occurs in four dimensions (including time) that ‘floats’ on a fathomless hyper-dimensional sea where distance does not exist at the same scale as it does in the four dimension universe and humans may learns to use its no-distance dimension as a shortcut amid galaxies of the universe. That age of faster than light travel may be very far away. It may take as much time for humanity to settle the galaxy at half light speed as it did for the first humans to migrate from Africa to America. Perseverance and steady philosophical reason are required for the voyage of progress.
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