Destined? Probably not. Probable yes, but not necessarily in our lifetimes. It all depends on so many things. NASA and the ESA will definitely send a manned mission to Mars. Eventually. But even NASA says not till the 2030s and the ESA hasn't set a time frame. It could then go one of two ways. It could play out like the Apollo missions and just stop. Or they could eventually set up a mars base. But that could take over a century if they're not looking to start for 15-25 years. Then you've got your private companies. There's so many of them out there with 2018 as their target, but most are running behind schedule. Even assuming one of the more enthusiastic proposals by Mars One there won't be a human base on Mars until 2025. Even then it would only be for 4 people, reaching capacity for 40 people in 10 years. Assuming all went well with all the missions and they continued their planned schedule, it would reach a capacity of 400 in 100 years. But all of this could be accelerated by setting up a moon base and/or a space elevator. Only Russia and Japan have plans to colonise the moon and they both have vague targets in the 2030s. A space elevator could cut the cost of launching spacecraft from $2500 to $250 per kilo, but there's no plans to build one right now. This could all be sped up again through asteroid mining, but even the most optimistic plans start in the 2020s. Even then it would take several decades to build the infrastructure to a point where it would turn a profit. So assuming everything goes to plan, we might have 2, maybe 5 (because US, EU, China and Russia have to keep up with each other) moon bases in 20-30 years. Maybe a few Mars bases at the same time, just around the time asteroid mining starts to turn a profit. By the turn of the century, again being wildly optimistic, it [i]could[/i] reach the point that we have half a dozen moon bases and Mars bases of 50-1000 people. This is probably the point we could start building longer range ships to go to the dwarf planets in asteroid belt and Jupiter's moons. Assuming all goes well and we don't blow ourselves up by 2150 we could have a combined total population of over 30,000 on the moon and Mars and maybe another 10,000 in the outer solar system. But really who knows??? It could happen. It could all die out like the Apollo missions did. But I don't think we're going to see anything star treky for a long, long time. More like the "Alien" universe with long assed journeys between worlds. Extra solar exploration is going to need a massive breakthrough in propulsion or cryo tech to be playable though, and that could take centuries.