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In my admittedly not-so-educated view, it seems unlikely.

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Interesting. I feel it's almost certain to happen eventually. I suppose it's theoretically possible that we completely wipe ourselves out first, but I find that very unlikely. With all of our flaws, we still stubbornly cling to this whole existence thing. I think that ultimately will mean cooler heads will prevail.

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We may wipe ourselves off the planet accidentally.

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I really don't think that's possible. I'm not even sure if we could do it purposefully at this point. The wealthiest nation in human history has been planning for this contingency for 75 years now.

But, accidentally? 7 billion and growing with technology and the sharing of ideas so proliferated at this point? Don't get me wrong, we have plenty of growing pains still ahead. Some of which will probably be pretty awful. We'll make it through all of them, though, wiser and fitter.

Humanity has some really big things in store for it. We really are just getting started.

All good questions, but keep in mind:

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It would take unprecedented collaboration to carry out the task, even if we had the answers.

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People said the same thing about landing on the moon. We did it with a computer with the processing power of a 1987 Casio digital watch. ( To be fair, that's a bit of popular hyperbole. The AGC was an extremely sophisticated piece of technology, particularly for it's time.)

I don't see anything insurmountable with any of them, though. To me, the better we get at harnessing energy, developing processing power, and sharing information, the better we get at solving all of those problems. Looking at the horizon of our potential and it seems like just a matter of time before our progeny are debating whether or not we can actually leave the galaxy.

Excellent, excellent quote. I suddenly have the urge to read some RLS.

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This is difficult to talk about because it's so speculative and I don't know much about it.

For all I know, we could have a plan in the works now.

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Fair point. As far as I can tell, it seems we already do have a plan for colonizing Mars in the works. In fact, we likely have a host of competing plans. I'm sure you're aware we are conducting analogous experiments as we speak.

Of course, that's just one step. It just happens to be the step right in front of us. Many other steps will follow.

Bringing this back to your OP, I guess part of what makes me so optimistic is seeing how successful life has been when it didn't even know what it was doing.

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imaginable

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Sure they are imaginable. We've been imaging them for a century, now. Don't you read any science fiction?

I get your point, though, however a few centuries ago atomic power was unimaginable, as you might put it.

However, even if we are perpetually confined to our own solar system, just colonizing Mars and a few Saturn/Jupiter moons would be pretty amazing, and certainly seems within our grasp over the next century or so.

Going back to interstellar, though, just try to imagine where we might be technologically speaking and our understanding of the Universe 1,000 or even 10,000 years from now. If there is a way, we will find it, eventually.

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I just think we have a much larger chance of failure than success.

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You know, just as an aside, NASA's most optimistic estimates for the first moon orbit to be a success was 50/50? The Apollo mission cost something like 110 billion dollars in today's money, and we were willing to risk it all on a coin flip.

When it comes down to it, we all have a little bit of Han in us: