People have been visiting space for several decades now, but the visits to space these last couple of weeks by private citizens is a remarkable breakthrough. We’re at the very beginning of commercial traveling to space. Still, I believe that space travel will accelerate at a pace never imagined because of competition among private enterprises. I’m jealous of the future generations for whom space travel will be something they take for granted. I cannot imagine what it must be like seeing our world as the beautiful blue sphere that it is. I wonder if in my lifetime we’ll see tourism to the Moon or even Mars.

Will we ever, as a species, be able to travel to another star? The closest one, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. Using current technology, it would take 6,300 years to reach this star. 6,300 years ago humans were emerging from the Stone Age and starting working with metal. Many civilizations rose and fell during the time it would take a modern human to reach the nearest star besides the sun. As much as I like to imagine being able to travel to around the galaxy, explore new worlds, and see the supermassive blackhole at the center of the galaxy, I reazlie it is an imposibility given the unimaginably long distances and the countless number of stars in our galaxy alone.

I imagine that the explorers of the future that will be residing amongs many stars beyond our own will inevitably be a new inorganic “life” of our creation. We see the seeds of this in the Voyagers that are only now traveling past the boundaries of our solar system.