Breakthrough Starshot – a $100 million initiative privately funded by Russian billionaires Yuri and Julia Milner – is focusing on propelling a tiny unmanned probe by hitting its extremely lightweight sail with a powerful Earth-based laser. The idea is that if the spacecraft is small enough – and we’re talking barely a gram – and the sail light enough, the impact of the laser will be enough to gradually accelerate the craft to around one-fifth of the speed of light, taking it to Alpha Centauri in around 20 years.

The Milners are counting on miniaturisation technologies to enable this tiny craft to carry a camera, thrusters, a power supply, communication and navigation equipment so it can report on what it sees as it flashes past Proxima b. Hopefully the news will be good, because that will lay the foundation for the next and more difficult stage of interstellar travel: people-moving.

WHAT ABOUT WARP DRIVE?

Star Trek made it all look so easy, but everything we currently know about the laws of physics tells us that faster-than-light travel – or even travel at the speed of light – is not possible. Not that science is throwing in the towel. Inspired by another propulsion system that has captured the imagine of science fiction creators, Nasa’s Evolutionary Xenon Thruster project is developing an ion engine which is hoped to accelerate a spacecraft to speeds up to 90,000mph (145,000km/h) using only a fraction of the fuel of a conventional rocket.

But even at those speeds, we won’t be getting far out of the Solar System within a single generation of spacefarers. Until we work out how to warp time and space, interstellar travel is going to be a very slow boat to the future. It might even be better to think of that travel period as the end itself, rather than a means to an end.

HOW WOULD WE SURVIVE ON AN INTERSTELLAR VOYAGE?

Warp drives and ion propulsion are all very sexy, but they’re not much use if our interstellar voyagers starve, dehydrate or suffocate long before they even leave our own Solar System. Researcher Rachel Armstrong, who will be presenting at BBC Future’s World-Changing Ideas Summit in Sydney in November, argues we need to start thinking about the ecosystem that interstellar humanity will occupy out there in between the stars. “We’re moving from an industrial view of reality to an ecological view of reality,” she says.