Alas, we do not live in Star Trek; the speed of light, as far as we can tell, is an insurmountable limit. This means that even if we wanted to visit the closest star system, we would have to travel for several years. We currently have no spacecraft that can travel at the speed of light, but proposals have been made for an extremely light spacecraft that could be accelerated using a laser and a solar sail to a fraction of the speed of light. One astrophysicist now asks: Why not send one of them to a black hole?

There have been mission proposals like this to visit exoplanets. Project Starshot is one example. The goal there is to accelerate a nanocraft less than 100 grams to 20 percent of the speed of light, traveling the 4.2 light-years to Proxima Centauri , the closest star to the Sun,

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