Turning Inwards, Or Science Fiction Becomes Reality

I'm nearing the end of "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton, a 988 page tour de force of a science fiction novel. In it, Hamilton portrays a future that I had imagined I would grow up in, where we have spread out into the cosmos and harvested the near infinite resources of space (asteroids, solar radiation, etc). In his novel, humanity has harnessed wormhole technology and used it to build a commonwealth of star-systems, and people use the holes almost as daily transportation; It's much quicker to ride into a wormhole station in New York and come out in Paris two minutes later. A ride to the nearest colonized star-system would take an hour or so.

In Hamilton's universe, we have learned how to upload our memories into data-bases so that when we grow old, or experience a catastrophic organic failure, the memories are then downloaded into a ready made clone that's been cryogenically frozen until such need arises. So with plenty of space to grow, and death all but eliminated, everyone can pursue very long-term goals and see them to fruition.

It was along these lines that, when I was around 9 and already reading hard sci-fi, I thought the world would look like when I grew up. Well, not quite as advanced, but I imagined that after the introduction of the space-shuttle when I was 10, it would be on to the stars from there.
So much for that.
Needless to say Iv'e become quite disillusioned, almost to the point of being misanathropic; how could my species let me down like this...let all of humanity down? Many esteemed scientists, including Stephan Hawking and Michio Kaku hold that the window of escape is closing, that if we can't establish a foothold elsewhere in the solar system within 50 or 100 yrs, then we will most likely become extinct from one man-made cause or another.

So instead of continuing to turn inward against each other in endless wars for resources and bickering about senseless ideologies, we should be reaching for the stars for a common cause... survival. We have the potential, it can be done but time is running out.