>>11654039Okay? What relevance does that have exactly?
If you're talking about future transportation systems, we'll always have chemically propelled vehicles forever, but we may also have more advanced things like micro-fission engines, fusion candles, antimatter annihilation ramjets, black hole drives, etc. Each technology will have its own niche to fill.
If you're talking about colonization progression, there's literally no reason why we won't be able to do interstellar colonization as soon as we're able to colonize the asteroid belt. Doing that means we'll have the technology to build large spin-gravity habitats, which means even with basic nuclear propulsion systems we can easily send fleets of large spacecraft to other stars with all the factories and power supplies and other technology necessary for them to be totally self sufficient for hundreds of thousands of years of coasting in interstellar space with no mining or anything.
You may ask why, but given the industrial capability explosion that would come with colonizing space, as well as the population explosion, that question becomes somewhat meaningless. There will come a point in the future that enough people will be living in communities aboard rotating space habitats that the small fraction of people that would want to go on an interstellar colonization trip just for the hell of it would be large enough that they could collectively afford to buy the necessary habitats and supplies and leave all on their own. What I'm saying is, at some point your crowd becomes so big that you can literally crowd-source an entire colonization fleet headed off to another star.
The point in time at which crowd-sourced interstellar colonization will become possible will come far before the solar system reaches its ultimate state, which is the point at which every large object is not only colonized but disassembled for materials for space habitats and for fuels.
