British physicist Stephen Hawking recently said we must get off this rock or die here en masse.
"Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out."
The late President Ronald Reagan was more upbeat about it. He said only the Milky Way is big enough to encompass the human imagination.
"In a Sept. 22, 1988, speech at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, shortly before a launch of the space shuttle Discovery, Reagan said: ‘It is mankind’s manifest destiny to bring our humanity into space; to colonize this galaxy; and as a nation, we have the power to determine whether America will lead or will follow.’"
Via NewsMax for the Reagan quote, from their email alert, but I can’t find a link.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
Here is the link, with the rest of the speech, etc.:
http://theklugblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/reagan-1988-anticipates-hawking_03.html
Thanks!
A goal like this requires as a minimum (and I am not mentioning the purely technical stumbling blocks) the humanity to act as a whole.
And we as far from this condition as ever, unfortunately.
Could be. But they already stand in line to get a mere low-orbit ride on the space shuttle, or via the pay-as-you-go Russian program. British physicist Hawking says matter-anti-matter propulsion is plausible and would mean a six-year, sub-light-speed journey to the nearest star. A huge undertaking, obviously, but I still think people would line up to go, especially if there’d been a few regional nuke wars in the meantime.