Comment Re:"Take your time for a thoughtful response" (Score 1) 272
Chances are, if nobody does it by canoe to prove it can be done, nobody else will want to invest in building a cruise ship at all.
And if we have not bothered to travel 16 light years in 400,000 years of tech advancement then we probalby will have no interest in going 3 ly at that point either. We could head for alpha centauri right now if we had the will and the billions of extra dollars floating around.
First build the the ship at a Lagrange point. Then launch for our nearest neighbor. If we used an Orion drive the astronauts could be at Alpha Centauri in maybe 75 to 80 years. A single human lifetime. Unfortunately, unless we got very lucky with our ship design we probably couldn't get adult astronauts there before they died. So it has to be a generation ship albeit barely with just 2 generations.
Or we could just send computers and robots there. I personally think it would be better to send at least some quasi-suicidal humans as well because nothing ever works out the way it is supposed to. For such a long trip I think it would be wise to have tech people to fix things and adjust for unpredicted events and breakdowns.