I think by the time we got that spacecraft there it would be met by people who made the trip faster but left later...
I just figured out that fusion rockets could only reach 10% of the speed of light. Which would take 200 years, so it wouldn't really be worth it. :-/
Fission rockets can only reach about 3% of the speed of light, and that's the fastest current day technology we have.
Light sails, therefore, might be a much better idea. We'd need to launch a sheet of mylar 1 km thick into space, though. It would take a km wide laser pouring 10 gigawatts a year into it, but it could make it to the nearest star in 10 years. Which, honestly, doesn't seem all that unreasonable. It could happen in our lifetime. And we'd only be able to send probes, since the shielding required to send a crew would simply put far too much weight into it. Also, we could up the wattage of our laser in the future as our technology becomes better, which would provide some degree of built in advancement (although it doesn't rule out the possibility of us making some massive breakthrough in other kinds of rockets).
The possibility of FTL technology is something that doesn't seem unreasonable
from the current viewpoint. The "warp" drive would require exotic matter with negative mass, and the wormhole concept similarly requires an anti-gravity field. Grind told me that there may be "natural" worm holes out there, but I've only ever read about wormholes in the context of them being black holes. He heard it on a Discovery documentary or something like that, which makes me sigh. The possibility of anti-gravity seems slim, but we won't know for certain until we get the Theory of Everything, which will fully describe gravity as a force, and could possibly offer ways to go FTL.
BTW, the reason FTL travel is time travel is that, for the person in a rocket going at the speed of light, the speed of light is essentially infinity speed. Time dilation comes into play - at 30% of the speed of light, time is dighlighted from the voyagers perspective by 0.1 times. At 99%, time is dilated by about 2.5 times. At 99.99%, that's 22 times. 99.99999999% - 22360 times. And of course, at the speed of light that's infinity. It is very limited for an outside observer, but you could travel across the universe from your perspective in the blink of an eye if you could travel at the speed of light. You'd just arrive 80 billion years in the future and everyone you loved would be dead. What people really want to do is have the space travelers go faster than the speed of light from an observers perspective - which is something else entirely, and would require the bending of space. I've heard people say that even this concept would be time travel, but I don't see why it would be so if time dilation didn't put you above infinity speed.
