100-Year Starship some way off

If someone is going to spend 500 years getting to P. Centaurus, they
might as well not try. Later on someone else will make a much faster
ship, and even though the other ship left after you them, the other
ship will arrive there far sooner. And so by the time the first ship
finally makes it to Proxima Centauri, they will be greeted, not by the
people who made it before them, but by their great-grandchildren...

That amount of energy mentioned, though huge by our current standards,
is nothing compared to the amount of energy poured out by the sun
every second (10^26 J/s). So a truly gigantic solar panel -- something
the size of a planet -- could readily supply that energy.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, sraj wrote: