Fwiw, for about eight years now I've been naming each box after a progressively more recent person who brought us closer to databases.
Hesiod
MarcusB (after Marcus Aurelius)
FrancisBacon
Sam (after Samuel Johnson)
etc.

Always wanted to have a Voltaire but ended up using that one for a machine that fubared.

I've just now decided to switch entirely. Maybe colors this time.

Back in the eighties all of my files and apps were kept for years on . . . . wait for it . . . 3 and a half inch floppies, all kept in a little box. Each new disk was named it after some "cute girl" I knew or had known, mostly ones from the NYC high school I went to, which was perfect since I got my first "real" computer at CMU in Pittsburgh. Each one was for a given subject with that subject meant to match the personality of the girl in question. Audrey was science, Rosemary was english, Anna was organizational stuff, etc. I even drew little pictures on each disk label.

In those days disks were expensive and more robust than you would think so my little stack lasted for years. Long enough for me to have moved back to NYC and have the inevitable happen - various of these girls ended up dropping by my place and discovering "their" disk. This rarely went well. And if you think that that was dicey, it didn't even compare to the reactions of girls who would come by my place for the first time and discover these so very thought out evocations of previous girls they didn't know about.

"So who is Audrey? Who is Simona?"
"Will you name a disk after me?"
"What subject would I be?"

Trust me on this, guys, don't do it. It will only end in grief.

Hey, man, welcome to the 21st century. Private companies do space stuff now, too. Since when do we need to get everybody to "work together" to do such a thing? Anyway, we could create a station faster than it takes most proposals to get written these days by using approaches like this one.

And fwiw, the ISS is famously a boondoggle whose costs are grotesquely outscale in no small part because of how well it worked to have "each nation...work together". For the amount of money and time that was blown on the ISS we could have gotten a colony built on the moon by now. Seriously. Maybe two of them.

So if you want to see us working together like that my question becomes, so, what are YOU doing to help, cobber? It's real easy to say what others should or could do, not so easy to do it.

You're right that 70ly is a long, long way. But three things counter that:
1.) Suspended animation is getting closer to real all the time and most of the supposed problems with that (such as radiation exposure in transit) are actually just matters of cost, not absolute limits.
2.) Generation ships.
3.) Yes, but what about getting to the nearer stars in part in the knowledge that the next generation would take the next step further away?

Perhaps the first two are examples of what you meant by "survive in space for a long time".

And keep in mind that what we can already see of a solar system is very far from complete. We may not be able to see anything orbiting Alpha Centauri yet but our resolution is rough indeed. In fact, our current techniques are in large part not even direct viewing but just imperfect means of derivation. I think that it's safe to say that we would find something there beyond just a ball of plasma.

As for your "they would go mad" absurdity, citation please. People have gotten by without contact with "civilization" for years on a regular basis for most of history. Look into how most of the Pacific islands were first settled. Or at some of the long duration nuclear sub cruises, which were shorter but still in very cramped spaces. Just bloody well watch Master and Commander or anything decent about 1500's to 1800's sailing ships.
 
People are tough. They adapt. Many of the proposals for ships to other solar systems have long proposed crews of several dozen or even more, quite enough to create a small society of their own. And if we were to choose to do it that way, we could send ships in clusters so that they would not all be at risk from one point of failure but could still communicate across the ships in transit and know that others would be there by the time they reached their destination.
 
Not only that, there are always some people out there who find the idea of near total isolation a feature rather than a bug. Just look at the history of forest service fire watch towers or lighthouse personnel. The travelers have plenty of ways to deal with human factors. Hell, maybe some of them would use up most of the trip smoking pot and playing video games. Add in a "real doll" and plenty of people would find it an improvement on their current level of social interaction. And if you think that I'm joking you're not paying attention.

So if "swimming" isn't the right approach, how about those little handheld fans that they always give out at trade shows?

Seems to me like all the more reason to stop buying "refrigerators" and start just having big insulated boxes built in when we redo a kitchen or build a house. Look at the suggestions above. Heat exchanger linked with outside air and house HVAC. Big block of thermal mass inside. Networked controller. Chiller a bit off to the side. Add all this up and you'll get a much more robust result where even if the chiller or some other part breaks down, all that you do is replace it with another chiller (or whatever). And since that chiller is a separate component in its own little cabinet off to the side or even through the wall, it's no big deal if the new one is a different design. As long as it still provides that stream of cold air it can be made of nanomachinery-linked magic Fritos for all that your fridge will care.

You're right. Current appliances are cobbled together crap that's built of cheap parts, includes a shitty manual, and is a pain to repair or even modify. Why the hell do /.ers, of all people put up with this?

Yours doesn't already?