“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

This is happening 124 light years away from earth.

That means if we develop a way to make a space ship accelerate at 1g for a long period of time, you could go there in just 10 relativistic years.

Unfortunately, whilst science allows such a rocket, our engineering skills are far from being able to build one.

Calling it simply an engineering issue is not properly conveying the ridiculousness of such a journey. For a small space ship of 1000 tons, this would take ten thousand times the current yearly energy consumption of mankind. So we'd need to figure out how to generate the energy and then store it on a space ship before even thinking about the engineering.

And that's ignoring the mass of the fuel. The classical rocket equation has the mass going exponentially with the velocity, which makes this endeavor even more mind bogglingly ridiculous. We'd actually need 2 million years worth of our current yearly energy consumption.

It's fun to think about, but being clear about the challenges puts quite the damper on it.

It does not have to be a chemical rocket. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot