re: Colonizing Mars- really what’s the point?

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You do realize that these stars are trillions of miles away and that even the most optimistic outlook on space travel and physics would put the travel time at somewhere between 50,000 - 100,000 years.

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Estimates for one version of Project Orion (a nuclear powered spacecraft looked at in the 60’s) estimated travel time to Alpha Centauri in ~500 years. With advances in the next few hundred years (propulsion, cryogenics) who knows what’s posssible.