Dude, it's not about the attitude, it's about the numbers. The closest galaxy is four million light years away. Unless there is a major scientific breakthrough in the eons to come that will allow us to travel at speeds 100 times the speed of light there is practical no way to make such a trip. Even with a speed like that and taking under consideration the special relativity which says that time for those traveling will be passing a lot slower than for the rest of use, you'd need at least a millennium to do such a trip.
So you don't try to short cut the laws of physics you fix the weakest links, the biggest one being the longevity of humans. It is realistic to think that given enough time we will be able to replicate organic machines with electro-mechanical ones. Someone somewhere is going to volunteer to upload themselves into one of these machines and we blast them off into space. In the end we always seems to achieve the dreams of the human spirit, 9 times out of 10 they are never the way we envisioned we would. Take flight, early man envisioned wings like a bird and not machines like a plane, but in the end we achieved flight something many people said would never happen, that I am sure of. I think we will achieve intergalactic travel, but it will be nothing like what we envision it to be today, something will come out of left field that will enable it. The challenges are daunting but so was flight at one point in human history.
Exactly! in the future, One can build robots or artificially intelligent machines that can travel and make some decisions on themselves. Such machines will not need most biological conditions needed for organic life to survive. So can live in many hostile conditions.
They can also clone themselves mining the resources and energy available at anywhere they land.
I think the actual feasibility of man made annihilation is smaller than what it is made out to be by the media and entertainment industry. The two most popular ways that are highlighted are nuclear war or bio-engineered pathogen. As far as the first one goes, nuclear war will only eliminate the population centers and irradiate everything, there would be survivors and they would adapt to the conditions.
The second, a pathogen, is just as unlikely to get every last one of us. A virus with a 100% kill rate is highly unlikely. Look at Ebola, while weaponized Ebola would get a great deal of us it's kill rate is somewhere in the 90%'tile, I don't know the exact number but I know it is high and I believe that it is the highest. 10% of the earth population is still allot of people. Even if it is less than that, somewhere their will be a group of people that for whatever reason are resistant to the pathogen.
The only thing that I think is a real threat to our existence today, is a big piece of something floating around out there, deciding to slam into us down here. I don't think we have the capability to do it to ourselves. I heard someone say that it is likely that we will keep resetting ourselves back to the stone-age at a certain mark in technological progress, which I think is a little more feasible, but I personally believe that mans desire to cull different people is self regulation for whatever reason.
