So UFO's and aliens... what's the deal?

[Fake Messiah]

One answer to the Fermi paradox is that interstellar travel is really, really hard, if not impossible.

Would be nice, though.

Well if you want to talk about interstellar travel it's not impossible and it would be nice to at least visit one other star system to see how it looks like up close - is it how we predicted or not.
The biggest problem about interstellar travel is the reason why. It is estimated that we could send, right now, few people to Mars with the cost of 50 billion dollars, but who would pay for it and most importantly why? There is no profit in it or at least it looks like that. There is no golden bowl awaiting us on Mars or fountain of youth.
We must face the truth that we are profit driven society and until that changes we won't advance much in space exploration. Even when minor spacecrafts are launched today there are always questions "Why?" it is even frequently questioned why have space program at all and then people are reminded that we got weather satellites and mobile phones from space program. I mean just remember how hard it was for Columbus to get the money to sail where no man has gone before and he had to find profit in it. And when we're talking about Columbus we could say that interstellar travel is incredibly difficult, perhaps as difficult to us today as a flight to Mars would have appeared to Christopher Columbus.