The nearest star to our sun is Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf, about 4.25 light years away, and it has a planet called Proxima Centauri b that’s about the same size as Earth and is in the star’s habitable zone, for liquid water and breathable atmosphere. It orbits it’s star in 11 days, so for it, 11 days is a year.
Traveling at one-tenth of light speed, it would take 42.5 years. All this is from Google and since it’s not political propaganda it’s probably pretty accurate.
I’m just thinking here… it’s getting pretty common again for humans to live past 100 years. I say again because if you examine old records of past centuries, it was common before. The reason that average life spans were short was because of the high incidence of deaths from diseases and malnutrition averaging things out, and my point is that any truly advanced race has found ways to live much longer lives and doing so has forced them to either expand outward or limit their numbers, or both.
If you could live 300, 400 years and had developed hibernative deep sleep, just supposing now, a 40-odd year trip to a distant star would seem only as long as the time you were actually awake during it and would have little effect on your state of aging.
You don’t have to go that fast, you could go at half that speed, take 80 or 90 years. If you’re in a hibernative state, what does it matter?
There’s a habitable planet circling the closest star to our own. If it’s not inhabited, we could inhabit it, all we need, really, is only another 10 to 20 years more of scientific advance. We’re nearly there now, and that’s doing this with a form of rocket or propulsion power, not any of the exotic means that physics says is possible that we haven’t figured out yet.
These simple facts of distance, time and our pending capabilities are why I’ve no time for the naysayers of human ingenuity and invention. “Oh it’s too far”. When I was a boy, the top, most accepted science fiction story was people going to the Moon by being shot out of an enormous cannon in a tiny spaceship/capsule. The actual possibility of going there was considered impossible because it was impossible at the time. There was zero technology to do it. This is changing rapidly.
Artificial Intelligence is the new industry. Stone Age, Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age, Electronic Age, AI Age and from here our knowledge is expanding in all directions faster than we can keep up. In two more years or possibly less I will be about to buy an autonomous humanoid robot to help me around the house and read for me, as my AMD has me down to one eye to read with, for now, and the price may be under $20,000, considering all the competition now in the intelligent robot industry.
We don’t need humans to travel the vast distances to the stars, our robots can do it, they can turn off for the duration of the trip and then turn on again, like new, ready to go. Take 500 years, no matter, take another 500 years coming back to report. By then 1000 years have passed and our technology has leaped so far forward in that time, what apparent miracles as we would call them today, will we be capable of?
No star is too far.