The Horror in Clay

A few months ago, I took back some old book I was given for my birthday by an uncle in the 80s. Here is the very first paragraph:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Although it was just some pulp fiction horror book, that paragraph echoed deep in my mind. Is it all true? Are we just insects on a small island?

Will we, in a few years, reach the conclusion that there is no hyperspace, no light wall to go through, and that the rest of the universe is just so inhumanly far, that we are not meant to go there? Is reality these overstretched amounts of space and time? Light-years and eons.

Unless there is a way to bend the laws of physics, they completely forbid us to visit other stars. When we'll realise that we are alone, will we go mad, or invent a new obscurantism?