Flying to other solar systems, would that ever be possible?! Last week, a web-publication appeared in which scientists have came up with a way to do this and formulated 20 challenges in design and material science to make it possible:
http://www.breakthroughinitiatives.org/Challenges/3
If you now think of large spaceships, you are wrong. It concerns so called nanocrafts; little computer chips with a camera, battery and communication device that have a large (4m x 4m) sail to catch laser beams from earth (for initial energy and communication). The advantage of these nanocrafts is that they are so lightweight that they may reach velocities as fast as 1/5 of the light speed! This means that the closest star at 4 light years away could be reached in 20 years. Of course this is optimistic. But wouldn't it be wonderful to reach several of our neighbor solar systems (List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs) within 50 to 100 years?
Some see it as the unavoidable step to discover 'new earths' just in time before ours becomes uninhabitable. Columbus discovered America because Europe was so dirty, overfished and deforested that it was an urgent to find new resources and clean places to start over again. I think, curiosity is still the best motivation to explore and discover and should create new opportunities beside -and not instead of- existing ones (Europe is now more clean, forested and sustainable than 200-500 years ago!).
This example from breakthroughinitiatives nicely illustrates how you set goals in science; by dreaming, extrapolating and definition of realistic small steps!
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