Will we ever visit other stars?
The prospects for interstellar travel are quite daunting, primarily because stars are so incredibly far away. The nearest star lies more than 24 trillion miles away. At the fastest speed our spacecraft currently attain -- around 100,000 miles an hour or so -- it would take almost 28,000 years to get there. Even at only five percent of the speed of light (an unimaginable engineering feat of almost 34 million miles an hour), the trip would still take almost 82 years, with an equally lengthy return trip.
Our best bet may be to build an enormous colony-type spacecraft capable of sustaining a crew for the decades necessary to reach even the nearest stars. Others believe the distance problem may be avoidable altogether through some exotic twist of physics, such as traveling through a wormhole. While either of these plans might seem unlikely at the present, hope springs eternal among scientists and astronomers. Given adequate time and resources, perhaps an interstellar journey does in fact lie in our future.
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