Originally Posted by vonBaur
the fact is that we are on the brink of interstellar travel (probably 200 years away or less)


Well first off that simply is not fact - that's conjecture.

But anyway, if by that you mean unmanned probes, one way trip, and merely to the closest other star, yeah I don't think that could be ruled out any more than one person winning a lottery jackpot (which means the odds against it are way, way higher than 99%)...

But consider that Voyager, traveling at tens of thousands of MPH, would take around EIGHTY THOUSAND YEARS to cover that distance...

And let's not even get into the fantasy world of superluminal travel - it simply does not exist, and never will. Einstein proved that. The equation for speed is distance divided by time, but time ceases to exist at the speed of light, that is why there is no definable speed that even EXISTS above the speed of light.

It's like saying "If we just had better technology we could go further north than the north pole"...