Comment by jonhohle

> current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager

As I understand it, not really. Parker Solar Probe is crazy fast, but only because it has that trajectory, and is unable to just change course and keep that speed in other directions.

If you want to launch something for deep space, the Jupiter-Saturn slingshot is still the most powerful trajectory we know of.

Today's rocket engines would give the probe a higher initial speed, but the final velocity would not differ dramatically. A fair bit higher, but not orders of magnitude.

> Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen

You are underestimating acceleration. To travel and come to a stop at 4.2 light years, a spaceship with 1g acceleration barely needs 3.5 years in relativistic ship time (~6 years earth time).

The technology to sustain 1g acceleration through 3.5 years is a different story, but very much within our understanding of physics (and not warp drives, etc). 20-50 years of engineering can get us there.

Humans might one day have settlements around the solar system and in free space (large stations, etc.), but I have doubts about whether we'll ever go to the stars.

For machine intelligence, though, it would be easy. Just switch yourself off for a few thousand years.

It's likely that our "children" will go to the stars, not us.

Getting the travel time down to 500 years would be a reasonable goal.

You'd ship embryos and caregiver robots, start breeding/raising people 30 years before you'd arrive.

Just spitballing, but maybe it would be possible with relatively modest advances in ion thrusters, and one (admittedly less-than-modest) breakthrough with fusion.

It's maybe too speculative to even matter, but I don't think it's _crazy_ to imagine a handful of AI-fueled advances in materials discovery during the next decade or two. Possibly enough to unlock laser fusion, or something that could be crammed onto a spacecraft.