Quote Originally Posted by wooly_mammoth View Post
Such things are just fairy tales for now. It's still a hardcore challenge to get to a much closer and proven to be decent planet: Mars. And even if we get there, we still don't really have a clue what to do with it, at least if you leave the fairy tales aside. As vital as space travel and expansion is for the survival of our species, to be honest I don't think we'll make it in time. We're still at the level of dreaming about mining nearby asteroids and processing the raw ore in orbit, mostly with robots. Transporting human beings in safe conditions over such distances, with the equipment needed to survive the journey and establish a home elsewhere, that's just blue sky dreaming.
I was thinking of just a Voyager-like probe to 1) test the feasibility and potential unknown issues with interstellar flight, and 2) should it get there, to get a closer look at the planet. Transporting people comes after we know more about how to get to another star. Proxima b is just the first reasonable target for such an effort. And dreams are the seeds of future reality.