MFRMBoy... I think you have to think in realistic terms. To get there in (your time frame) 100 years requires travel at half the speed of light which is not easy to do. Then you need to know how to send back the information (should it record any decent information) which is not easy, then you got the huge costs of working out the logisitics and mathematics and engineering involved to do it (for example, how do you keep a battery charged for over 100 years of space travel) before you even think about the costs of actually building and launching the probe. And on top of all that, any results (and it would have a huge chance of fail rate) would not benefit anyone for maybe 10 or more generations.
You then have to realize that the politicians who have the final say on the funding of these expensive probe missions, missions that will MAYBE benefit humanity in 100+ years time (most likely much, much longer) are unlikely to give it the go ahead as they are only interested in current issues such as jobs, healthcare, military funding etc, and not something that no living person on this planet will ever benefit from. It is hard enough for them to put up money towards eco-projects to save THIS planet in 200 years time, let alone fund money towards other planets in the same time frame.
And then you have the other consideration that we as a race are advancing at such exponential rate of knots that we can achieve much more in 50 years than we can now. Look back 100 odd years and we have gone from land people to flying people. In 50 years we have gone from fighting hand to hand in wars, to using robots. In just 20 years we have gone from sitting in quiet libraries to read books alone, to being like a hive network all connected to each other sharing information electronically across the internet. So what is to say that 100 years from now we advance to the stage where we can actually discover advancements such as warp technology or space bending or whatever and end up designing a 500 man spaceship to fly to this planet in mere minutes, colonize it and then 20 years later have our own probe crash land on the nicely laid back lawn and reporting back it has found humans!
Put simply, it costs too much, it will likely fail too easily, it benefits nobody living today to warrant the funding, and within 30 years we could have technologically advance it before its even travelled 20% of the distance.
Small steps with high rate of success will eventually lead to larger ones. Huge jumps with a 99% chance of failure will lead to nothing but projects being abandoned more and more often.
Edited by ExoPaul, 08 November 2012 - 03:21 PM.
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