[Telepathic Intruder]

20 times farther than Neptune. Let’s see it took 9 years for New Horizons to reach Pluto. So that would make it around 150 years after discovery until we can send a probe to look at it. Can’t wait.

[Go_Raiders]

We’ll have small space probes capable of far faster travel in the next decade or so. Driven by lasers from earth, or a satellite.

We’ll be able to send a series of them to relay information back to Earth.

[pepsi_junkie]

"Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn’t just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it’s way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway)."

Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom charts but the solar system doesn’t end there. In fact, it isn’t even close to ending there. We won’t get to the solar system’s edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets… Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one 50,000th of the way.
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

[SunkenCiv]

Pluto was discovered telescopically in 1930 (Tombaugh continued mapping for years thereafter, and was convinced that he hadn't missed any planet-sized bodies in the ecliptic) and the New Horizons probe wasn't launched until 2006, a 76 year span. So, add that to the number of years we'll have to wait. ;^)