Comment by jandrese
Alpha Centauri is a triple star system with no habitable planets. Why in the hell would you go there? Sending people to another solar system is so resource intensive that assuming you can convert the entirety of Jupiter into some kind of orders of magnitude more efficient exotic rocket fuel you might have enough resources for a small handful of expeditions, so you really need to make them count.
Maybe it would make sense if you could convert the mass of Proxima Centauri into rocket fuel to fund more expeditions? That seems like a fairly long term plan though.
I mean, why did we go to Mars without any intention of colonizing it? The Moon?
Exploration is what humans do. If Alpha Centauri is only 5 years away, you can bet we're sending people there no matter what. Permanent colonization only becomes a priority in an existential event, and if we eventually achieve ~1.0C travel then that implies our tech is at a level we'd be colonizing Mars and a few moons long before we think about leaving the solar system.
Even getting to 0.9C is going to be very very hard for humanity.