WE NEED A MORE MATURE PERSPECTIVE ON SPACE TRAVEL

You know, we keep hearing about these advances in propulsion technology, high-altitude aircraft that can travel Mach 10, ion propulsion systems, plasma propulsion, et cetera, ad infinitum; and the "edutainment" networks keep feeding our kids these fantasies about interstellar space travel, leading kids to think that we'll be zipping around the stars in a century or so.

Those are lies, pie-in-the-sky nonsense.  Truth is that edutainment is conditioning people to perceive Space with terrestrial blinders.  The distances and energy requirements of interstellar travel are so incomprehensibly vast that we're not going to be flitting around the stars in the near or the distant future, either.

Not using four-dimensional propulsion systems, anyway.

Ionic and plasmatic propulsion are still just four-dimensional means of propulsion. It's still just a means of moving through Space... Which is NOT how you travel around a Universe so vast that even Light Speed isn't a meaningful velocity.

To travel interstellar and intergalactic distances within a meaningful time frame (like, well within a Human lifespan), you'd have to travel so fast that you'd never be able to contact those people you left behind. Which means you'd be starting civilization over EVERY TIME you reached a destination.

See what I mean?

Let's say you were able to accelerate to a billion times the speed of light... After two seconds at this speed, the human species that you left behind is EXTINCT. Oops. So YOU'RE IT... You're the sole representative of the Human species, several million years in the future.

Sorry, but that's how Einsteinian Physics works. The faster you travel in Space, the slower you travel in Time. Time Dilation would keep you forever young, but the rest of your species would die off. So you'd have to keep SEEDING Humanity, wherever you traveled.

My point is, four-dimensional Space travel aint gonna work in the long run, I don't care WHAT propulsion system you use.

Ultimately, we're going to abandon four-dimensional space travel — sooner than later, as a matter of fact. So we may never even attempt to build all those wonderfully quaint "starships" such as the USS Enterprise.

More than likely, we'll end up teleporting Doppelgangers of ourselves to far-flung destinations, and by "far-flung" I mean so far away that the USS Enterprise couldn't get there at Warp Ten for a million years.

A technology based on Quantum non-local simultaneity would blow EVERYTHING out of the water, rendering all forms of four-dimensional travel hopelessly obsolete.