Good call on Physorg.com. Lots of good stuff there. Certainly if we ever do colonize another solar system it will be a result of some combination of physics and engineering we don't, or only vaguely, understand presently.

If staying alive when faced with the normal stuff, like hurricanes and earthquakes, is Survival 101 and surviving a nuclear war is Survival 301 living on the moon would be Survival 601. Which makes extra-solar colonization Survival 1201. We have, as a species, barely begun to master our environment enough to prosper. It has only since the 1800s that we haven't been in a constant existential battle with famine and disease. We haven't conquered them. But our booming population shows we are no longer on the edge of extinction.

It seems to me that most of the biggest problems we face in the near future, outside a cosmic boot stomping us, have to do with human behaviors. Can we learn to get along? Can be live together? Can we control our consumption, greed and desire to reproduce enough to avoid being caught in a downward spiral of conflict, violence and destruction over ever scarcer resources?

IMHO the most important results of the space program were the photographs of the earth taken from the moon and Jupiter. The first shows the globe we know suspended in blackness. The second a tiny blue-green speck in a field of stars. We live on a planet-ship, a multi-generational star ship. Until we can build or find a replacement it is all we have to work with. We are living on a space capsule. A lifeboat on a vast empty sea. We either make it work ... or we don't.