Physicist Rene Heller from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Solar System (Germany) has estimated the time it takes for humanity to reach the ten stars closest to the Sun.
Humanity can reach the nearest ten stars in about a hundred years. Heller's forecast is based on the assumption that over the next 45 years, Earth will learn to create spacecraft accelerating to 0.2 speed of light. The expert believes that achieving such speeds is quite within the reach of humanity.
Heller analyzed bicentennial historical data, according to which the increase in speed developed by man-made vehicles (from steam locomotives to Voyager 1 station) is happening faster than previously thought (4.72 percent per year on average).
In April 2016, Russian businessman Yuri Milner and British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking announced the start of work on creating and sending a satellite to Alpha Centauri, the closest connected system of three stars to the Sun. NASA started working on a similar project called DE-STAR (Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and ExploRation) even earlier.
