2099? Maybe my daughter (b. 2004) will live to see it; in fact there's every reason to believe she and her cohort will live well into the 22nd Century, barring

2099? Maybe my daughter (b. 2004) will live to see it; in fact there's every reason to believe she and her cohort will live well into the 22nd Century, barring accidents, apocalyptic wars, terrorism, etc. I would hope they could get from 20% of light speed to 40%, and get one of those Coke cans to A. Centauri twice as fast, so more of us will live to see it. If you can send one such object, you can send a swarm of hundreds, and when they get there, those that survive will be able to do some interesting imaging and data gathering work for those eagerly waiting back home. Of course, by 2100 it's possible that vastly superior propulsion techniques (or the highly desirable wormhole technique described in the article) will have been developed that will blow right past these primitive tin cans. But you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. The bottom line here is that humanity, or at least some significant and affluent chunk of it, needs to want to do this badly enough to commit the resources. If not Euro-U.S.-Japan, perhaps eventually China or India. Or our robotic successors....