What would space-faring Humans look like

(shamelessly stolen from /r/WritingPrompts )

Space travel has been a reality for 50+ years now, and we haven't proceeded to go anywhere other than the nearest ball of rock or very low orbit, because there's no reason to do so. No resource in our solar system is both abundant enough and of sufficient value in relation to the expenditure of time, money, and lives it would require to get, and there's nothing near us that's worth going to see in person anyway.

And, don't kid yourself: if we HAD a reason to go, we absolutely could, even with the level of tech we have now.  Space flight has always been about return on investment and the ROI has always been absolute shit, outside of neat things like Tang and ballpoint pens and showing up the Soviet Union. If, for example, we found magical goo on Mars that cured male pattern baldness, we'd have a colony up and running and extracting said goo before the end of the decade.

Contemporary Sci-Fi that does a good job of being what I'd expect Humans in space to be is The Expanse: we're in space for the sole reason of resource exploitation so we can fight each other over the resources we're exploiting so that we can exploit more resources so that we can escalate the fight so that we can exploit more resources so that...

This fits how we behave stuck down here at the bottom of the gravity well pretty well: we're a brutal, xenophobic, tribal, murderous, greedy species. We don't even get along with each other all that well and at no point in history have we ever had much compunction about killing each other for resources. Or, for that matter, killing each other because we believe in different sky men, have different skin colors, or because it's Tuesday and someone is bored.

It's a very human interpretation of what we're ALREADY doing but in space.

Further, if we somehow gained Warp drive, or the Hyperdrive, or whatever the hell the Guild uses in Dune the question that is still unanswered is where would we go, and why would we go there?

Historically, and this is because we've done this repeatedly on this ball of rock, the first thing we'd do with that technology is we'd load up our guys on our new interstellar ship, the Caravel, and head off to find us some new world to conquer and see what valuables we can find to plunder, and, if the weather is nice enough, we'll also set up some settlements and take it for our own.

If there ARE aliens, they'll come in one of two varieties: the kind we can move next to, make worthless promises we know we won't ever keep, and then exterminate them when they're in the way of something we want, or the kind we try to move next to, they see we're rabid insane monkies, and they decide to call whatever the alien version of Orkin is to exterminate us instead.

There is no grand 'share the cosmos' as you see in Star Wars or Star Trek: sure, there's lots and lots of fighting between species in both of those series, but it's grumpy cat slap fights, and not real attempts to play for keeps. For the most part, Star Wars and Trek species get along quite well and for some reason seem to have developed an accepted galactic mating signal that involves your green shirt getting torn.

And, frankly, there are zero reasons to think that any OTHER species that has invested the time to become intergalactic, with all the technology you would have to develop and the sheer timeframe required would view the universe completely differently: if you're in space, you're in space because you had a good reason to go there and something you wanted, not just because you had nothing else to do.  

I'm aware this is a very anthropocentric view of the universe, but it does make sense: leaving a gravity well isn't free, the energy requirements to even putter along to the next solar system at even say, half the speed of light is immense and frankly, there's very little to nothing to find in most places anyway. If you're building a ship to travel between stars, you fully intend to get there, take something you find valuable, and stay. It's not a weekend jaunt to the nearest amusement park where you see the mascots and then pack on back home.

So back to the question: what would space-faring humans look like?

I can't claim that I have any real answers, but I strongly suspect it would be far more Spanish Conquistadors or Victorian-era British Empire than free-love hippies and everyone getting along. You're there for a resource or planet, and you're going to take it and if anything gets in the way, you'll resort to exactly as much violence as is needed to make sure it's clear that you now own whatever you're fighting over.

So, space humans would pretty much be normal humans, but in space with fancier means of conveyance.