<\/p>
In other words, if we had set out during the time when Neanderthals were around, we’d be reaching our destination right about now. The thing is, Proxima is like crossing the street in cosmic terms\u2014it’s just 4.24 light years away.<\/p>
Andromeda? Our neighboring galaxy is about 2.54 million light-years away. If we could travel at the speed of light (which we can’t), it would take us roughly the same amount of time to get there as has passed since the emergence of the Homo genus. At Voyager’s speed, we’d have to multiply that by 17,800. The numbers get pretty absurd, don’t they?<\/p>
Fortunately, humanity isn’t ready to accept the cosmic speed limit. In 2016, physicists from the Breakthrough Starshot project, funded by Yuri Milner, came up with the idea of solar sails propelled by laser beams. Tiny probes, weighing just a gram and equipped with sails spanning several to a few dozen square meters, would be accelerated by 100-gigawatt laser beams. They could reach 20% the speed of light and make it to Proxima in just 20 years. Pete Worden, the project director, likened it to shooting a butterfly with a rifle, except the butterfly is the size of a grain of sand, and the rifle is a Manhattan-sized laser.<\/p>
Another option is the ion thruster, which NASA is already testing in the Dawn mission. These engines eject xenon ions at a speed of 40 km\/s, providing a small but continuous thrust. The catch? With current technology, reaching Proxima would take tens of thousands of years, even under very optimistic assumptions, but probably even more if we’re being realistic. It’s progress, but it still doesn’t help much, unless we plan to establish a civilization on the spacecraft.<\/p>
In 1994, Miguel Alcubierre published a paper in “Classical and Quantum Gravity” about the theoretical possibility of warping spacetime. His drive, known as the Alcubierre bubble, would contract space in front of a ship and expand it behind, allowing for faster-than-light travel without breaking the laws of physics. The catch? We would need exotic matter with negative energy density, which is purely theoretical. In 2012, Harold White from NASA tweaked the equations, reducing the required energy from the mass of Jupiter to the mass of the Voyager probe. It’s still more energy than humanity has ever produced, but at least the figures aren’t cosmological anymore \u2014 though that’s just a speculative ballpark estimate.<\/p>
The latest buzz is about the EmDrive, which supposedly creates thrust without ejecting mass, which would break the law of momentum conservation. NASA’s 2016 tests showed a tiny bit of thrust, but most physicists remain skeptical. In 2021, Martin Tajmar from the University of Dresden demonstrated that the observed effect was likely just a measurement artifact.<\/p>
Carl Sagan once said that we’re like island dwellers just learning to build rafts. Maybe that’s a good thing \u2014 if we could freely travel among the stars, we’d probably take all our earthly problems with us, but in a galactic version. For now, we have to be content with stargazing and dreaming.<\/p>
Or maybe that’s the whole point? After all, it’s not the destination that matters, but… wait, when it comes to interstellar travel, the destination actually matters a lot. Especially if it’s going to take us 73,000 years.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If Voyager 1, our farthest space envoy, were headed towards Proxima Centauri (which it isn’t), it would take it about 73,000 years to arrive. That’s roughly the same amount of time since our ancestors decided to leave Africa and see what was beyond. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":16371,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[863,780],"tags":[],"popular":[],"difficulty-level":[36],"ppma_author":[614],"class_list":["post-16498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education-and-science","category-redakcja-poleca","difficulty-level-easy"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":614,"user_id":247,"is_guest":0,"slug":"prof-dr-hab-dariusz-jemielniak","display_name":"prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg"},"first_name":"Dariusz","last_name":"Jemielniak","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Profesor zarz\u0105dzania Akademii Leona Ko\u017ami\u0144skiego, gdzie kieruje katedr\u0105 MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies). Pracuje te\u017c jako faculty associate w Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society na Harvardzie. Wiceprezes Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Cz\u0142onek Rady Programowej CampusAI."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16499,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16498\/revisions\/16499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16498"},{"taxonomy":"popular","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/popular?post=16498"},{"taxonomy":"difficulty-level","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/difficulty-level?post=16498"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=16498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}