Yes, WE do want to go there ourselves - of course the WE will have to be in the royal sense, because unless you've got some immortality drug handy, it won't be any of the WEs reading this post now.

I don't expect to see basic interstellar travel by robot probes happening for at least another 50 years or more. Sending expensive and needy humans to Mars isn't planned to happen until the 2030s, and note that it is still a lot of talk over hardware. And if a future president cans Bush's space plans, don't expect interstellar travel of any sort to happen for another century.

If we aren't going to have humans on Mars for decades, don't expect the Starship Enterprise to happen any time soon.

But my point again, since WE aren't going to the stars, what does it matter if the exploration is done by intelligent machines? Did you avert your eyes from the images sent back from Mars and the Jovian worlds just because they were taken by robots? And in the coming years when we are ready for interstellar travel, I expect the lines between human and machine to be blurred, if not outright gone by then.

I know it's tough in this age of Star Trek and Star Wars to get beyond the idea of starships full of carbon units - I mean humans - plying the galaxy and worlds full of aliens who look and act a lot like us, just with funny-looking noses and ears, but if you delve further into what Bradbury has to say, you will see that he makes some very good points about the future evolution of our technology and likely the technology and society of others in the Universe.

SETI and space exploration has been stuck in some rather old paradigms for a while now, which may explain why SETI has yet to succeed.

Our descendants will go to the stars some day, but do you really think it will be with crews of bipeds who may have some nifty new toys but otherwise act and look just like us?

You might find this site interesting as well:

http://www.cs.usu.edu/~degaris/