This is the first project I've read about that produces a visceral reaction in me: a project I'd love to see develop, but which I probably won't live to see the

This is the first project I've read about that produces a visceral reaction in me: a project I'd love to see develop, but which I probably won't live to see the results of. I'm 43 now. Let's be optimistic and say this technology is proven in the next 5 years. Then a craft is built and launched in the next 5 years. Then there's 20 years of travel, and 5 more years before the images come back. If it all worked out perfectly, that's 35 years from now, and I'll be 78 if I'm still around. What's more likely is that a strategy for sending probes to nearby stars will be clarified in the next few decades, and I might live to see the first interstellar probes launched. I will die happy that we're reaching out, but sad to not know more about what's out there. Every year, the lasers would blast streams of probes towards new star systems. Before long, there would be probes en route to every star within ten light years. As the search radius expanded outward, data return times would lengthen to decades. But the delay might produce a lovely effect. As the centuries wore on, an expanding sphere of the universe would slowly reveal itself, in vivid detail, as waves of images returned from the stars. I'm happy to know the universe in much greater detail than what I learned when I was a young kid. I'm also happy that others may live in a time when probes from generations before will be beaming back their first transmissions.