If you think that interstellar flight is the stuff of science fiction, you have good reason to. After all, the distances needed to be covered are difficult to even comprehend. The closest star outside of our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light years away. That means it would take over four years to get there traveling at the speed of light, or approximately 186,000 miles per second. We can’t go that fast. The journey would take what is currently our fastest spacecraft, Voyager, about 80,000 years.

Remember when we were kids and we thought we’d have moon bases and manned voyages to Mars by now?

From bigthink.com.