When people watch too much sci-fi, they generally fail to examine first principles. The case here is obvious: why imagine that we need to send physical probes, never mind human beings, to some distant destination when improvements in technology will enable us to learn more and more, at a miniscule fraction of the cost of even a single star-directed mission?

Star Trek is not a reliable guide to anything except our appetite for endless cowboys-in-space entertainments. Ordinary people do not look up at the stars and feel an endless thirst to go there. They're too busy watching sports and reality TV shows and cramming McSlop down their throats to care about anything, never mind ludicrously expensive and scientifically pointless stunts.

We will explore distant star systems. But we will do so from where we are today, because that's the only approach that fits within economic and biological constraints. Everything else is just fiction.