[SunkenCiv]

Couple the beam from a 100 gigawatt laser with a single-layer... highly reflective sail... perhaps formed out of graphene... could attain speeds of 20 percent of c. That's good enough to carry a gram-scale payload to the nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri triple system, with a cruise time of 20 years, for a flyby followed by an agonizingly slow but eventually complete data return... the payload, which could take advantage of microminiaturization trends that, assuming they continue, could make a functional spacecraft smaller than a cell phone.

Thanks LibWhacker.

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[Red Badger]

The speed of light is not fast enough.

Even integer multiples of the speed of light are not fast enough.

Even if you had a ship that could do 10 times the speed of light, getting to a star 40 light years away, a relatively short, ‘neighborhood’ distance in galactic terms, it would still take 4 years to traverse the distance and 4 to get back home.

Unless and until man invents some ‘Star Trek’ type of propulsion system that will allow us to travel the stars in comfort and luxury, then we, as a species are essentially locked within our own solar system.

And so is everyone else in the universe...................