DashaBlade wrote: Personally, I think it won't happen until we've reached the next stage of human evolution.
Human evolution tends to take, at a minimum, tens of thousands of years. Some of the most recent estimates for when
Homo Sapiens Sapiens first evolved into its modern form put that evolution at about 100,000 years ago. Considering that we went from "not flying" to "robots on mars" in a century, I really doubt it would take us hundreds of times longer than that to go from "robots on mars" to "interstellar travel", particularly as NASA hopes to have an interstellar craft by 2100 and we're
already trying to create small warp bubbles.
The next step is a manned mission to Mars. I can't say exactly why this is, but it appears to be the stance of several spacefaring governments, including the US and Russian ones, so that's almost certainly our next step. If we actually dedicated sufficient resources we could start working on that mission right now and probably have it done within a couple decades, but because we have more expensive fish to fry, our budget is understandably not focused too much in that direction.
Long term I'm hoping for the warp drive. I'm not enough of a physicist to say whether this is the
most feasible idea for speedy interstellar travel, but right now it looks like a reasonably feasible idea, enough so that it's one that physicists and NASA are investigating.
The first physicist to propose the mechanism behind a warp drive did so in the 90s, but generating the warp bubble required about the energy equivalent of the mass of Jupiter (which, using the formula E=mc^2, is about 1.7 x 10^44 Joules, or 170 quintillion yottajoules). However, more recently, a physicist discovered a warp bubble geometry that could move a craft at about 10c (ten times the speed of light) using 6.5 x 10^19 Joules (65 exajoules), which is about half the amount America produces each year, meaning that this is an amount that we can actually make (though it'd probably be hard to store that in a spacecraft). Here's a video on the subject, made by an actual scientist: