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The fastest man made object will be the modern Parker probe at 430,000 mph. That is 0.0006% the speed of light. To get to Alpha Centauri it would take 6810 years. There is no point trying to go to Alpha Centauri. Nothing would make the trip.

There's an ambitious, but possibly feasible concept for this, with R&D happening now: the Breathrough Starshot initiative. Short form: many small probes with solar sails being driven by lasers.

I think you're missing a big part of this discussion. :) It's about using a lightsail to accelerate a tiny probe up to a significant fraction of the speed of light using Earth based lasers. See the Breakthrough Starshot initiative. The discussion was about the difficulty of slowing down on the other end.

This is crack pot science. We have NO CLUE what alien life might look like. We're starting with anthropomorphizing it if it even exists which is stupid. I have an idea, why don't we let Project Starshot with Stephen Hawking and company answer the question: is there other life in the universe first? Then, if there is "alien life" elsewhere, we can decide whether it's something to be concerned about.

Seems like this kind of technology would be very useful for long duration space probes.

Project Starshot perphaps? https://breakthroughinitiative...

Your first paragraph was a bit pedantic, since we all know he meant 'heavier than air' flight, and while it wasn't 100 years *exactly*, it should also have been clear the time was indicative, and not meant to be precise to the year. (The mere fact that a random event would have occurred *exactly* 100 years ago, is pretty slim.) I mean, you could still 'correct' him even if he was off by even a mere day, then, if one is going to be (even more) pedantic about it.

And while the first commercial *jet* airliner may have been in 1952, the first commercial airline was already opened in 1914, a mere 11 years after the first flight, thus.

Anyhow, the gist of his post was that technological development goes blistering fast, and you can't really say something is impossible. I think. Which I would agree with as long as its confined to technological problems/difficulties prohibiting it. I think humankind will *always* find a way (if they really want to) to overcome technical 'impossibilities'. It's a whole other story for things that go against the basic laws of physics, though, (such as the FTL, or 'devices' like the EM-drive, which is pure bullocks).

Of course, rest us the question of 'when', and I would agree with your last paragraph on that, which is that it is extremely unlikely that we or our descendants will see any landing by humans on a planet outside our solarsystem.*

We *might* see an interstellar probe going for it, in a form such as this: https://breakthroughinitiative...
If it can really reach it in 20 years, we might even see reach its destiny.*

*caveat: aside from sudden enormous breakthroughs in technology and/or physics (which is unlikely), the argument whether we will be able to see it or not, is also largely dependent on our lifespan. Ergo, if progress on longevity is picking up, the above scenarios would dramatically increase, in as far as the likelihood we could see them is involved. Even if we had to drink blood of children, I mean, have plasma infusions, for it. (http://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/peter-thiel-young-blood.html)

At first I was going to ask the doubters why Hawking would be involved if the project was so dubious, but after RTFA it is very unclear what Hawking has to do with it. He is quoted making several comments about SETI in general but nothing specific about this project. He isn't listed as a project leader. The closes I found was this quote "I strongly support the Breakthrough Initiatives and the search for extraterrestrial life.". It seems like they stuck his name in the headline for the prestige effect.