Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience

With Alpha Centauri being only 4 light years away, interstellar travel seems almost feasible. But then you consider all the inconvenient details, and realize such a journey would have to take hundreds, maybe thousands or even more years on top of some incredible advances in rocket tech.

If you go to something like Trappist (40 ly) at 0.01c (very optimistic), it's not just that everyone you know will be dead when you arrive. Your entire nation will have disappeared to the sands of time. The landfall announcement you send back will be incomprehensible because of language shifts, and you won't live to see the reply. Meanwhile, such a trip would be an enormous investment, requiring multiple nations to bankrupt themselves, with no hope of even surviving to see the outcome.

With that, it's very hard to imagine interstellar travel being feasible with our current understanding. There would have to be something like FTL travel or wormhole. The only "realistic" development, (much) better engines that can do 0.1c, would not actually change much.

> it's very hard to imagine interstellar travel being feasible with our current understanding.

Even with massive advancements in tech, and getting close to the speed of light, interstellar travel will be a lot of "one way heading into the unknown forever" kind of initiative. Interstellar empires only work with truly sci-fi tech that mostly ignores distances, like in sci-fi (instant subspace comms or warp travel with no relativistic effects)

This will never be the same kind of age of exploration as when we crossed the oceans and explored our planet. The scales are so mind blowing that even the fastest speed known to mankind is too slow. The times and distances involved to move and even just send signals (both ways!) and relativistic effects means at best we can "seed" a distant planet and hope that turns into a new (human?) civilization, forever separated from us for all practical purposes.