Stark Trek - How far are we?
dkokelley: The biggest inhibitor I think would be the lack of economical justifications for it. We don't need the space (or rather, what we would like is the space to be close. Take a plane trip across the U.S. and you'll find a whole lot of empty), and our natural resources will last us for the foreseeable future.What benefits are there? What we would need is a space 'gold rush' if we wanted to realistically expect any sort of real progress in that direction. Maybe we'll discover that there's oil (for example) on Mars. Maybe we'll see a lot more space speculators.That's it for financial issues. Of course finances will drive the technology. The most prominent pieces of technology we're missing are faster than light (or warp) engines, and artificial gravity. Warp would let us travel very far very efficiently, and artificial gravity would allow humans to spend extended periods of time in space. A couple other things we're missing are materials to build such starships (not sure if we have anything that would hold such large ships together in space), replicator and transporter technology, phasers, shields/forcefields, and last but not least, proton torpedoes. If anyone knows of technology listed above that exists today, please let me know.