I'll go ahead and jack this thread back on topic...
The article linked below is dead on target concerning humankind's chances of populating the far flung wasteland that is our universe. It's by Charles Stross, science fiction writer, and I should add, a futurist who thinks with his mind more than his heart. Our romantic notions of space exploration are horribly outdated to the point of being old fashioned and even irrelevant.
We are perhaps further away from deep space travel then you think. In context, the time it's taken us to go from donkey cart to modern automobile may well be how far we are from space ships capable of reaching neighboring stars, much less setting up colonies.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...ier_redux.html
I take my science fiction serious. If not, well then I'd confine myself to reading those books about elven kingdoms, dragons, knights, wizards, vampires, etc... by and large, science fiction is merely fantasy dressed up with technology.