Our fastest probes might top out, being extremely generous, at 100,000 MPH. 1 light year is around 5.86 trillion miles, so our nearest stellar neighbor of Alpha Centauri would be 4.32 ly away or ~25 trillion miles.
If I calculated correctly, that works out to 1141 years for a one way trip....
Do we need to consider relativity? Isn't it travelling into the future at that speed, so back on earth we'd have to wait even longer?
That is why we need to develop FTL technology...
Interesting. Certainly too far for a manned mission, but quite within the realm of possibility for an unmanned probe.
The pyramids and Great Wall of China took hundreds of years to build. Sending a probe to another star system could be a comparable monument left by our own generation.
-ccm