> Presumably sending a probe would not be feasible in any foreseeable timeframe?

With global resources we can do it but the people in charge of our countries wouldn't have a job if they didn't invent fake boogeymen. does anyone really see that changing in their lifetime?

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How do you propose getting a probe to something 120 light years away and getting an answer within a human lifetime, unless you're going for a ride on the probe? Do you have some new physics?

The Centauri system is 4 light years away, my link shows a proposal of how to do that with a flyby, it's most certainly not the only starshot proposal just the one with a prominent billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg behind it so I thought perhaps the best to put out there for people to see as an intro to the concept.

These are very real ideas with very real engineering designs by incredibly smart people. It's not sci-fi mate, we can actually do this with enough wherewithal.

Right.... but 4 light years is one thirtieth as much as 120. Unless you find a way around relativity I don't see how anyone alive now would get results from a mission to something 120 light years away, regardless of its velocity. Unless we vastly increase human life span, which might be the easier option.

Next steps will be: Observation, more observation and if it remains sufficiently interesting then perhaps some bespoke observation. Nothing will be sent in the foreseeable future.

The best time to send a probe to an exoplanet is 200 years ago. The second-best time to do it is now.

Perhaps not, if the speed you can drive a probe is increasing with technological development it might be a waste of time to send a probe that'll be overtaken by its newer sisters.

The technological development is driven by the need to launch the probe. You need to start somewhere.

And what's more is we'll probably send the next probe someplace else.

No, sending it several million years ago would be better.

Better yet if it was always there.

This star is 124 LY away. If we launched our fastest ever probe in that direction, which was New Horizons, it would take 2.2 million years for it to reach the system. Assuming the probe could then be still operational to transmit back data, it would then take 124 years for the data to be received.

So the next step would be to build better and better telescopes to observe these planets, learn about their composition, and inspire people to study and fund the sciences.

There are some proposals of how to build fast probes that could visit very close star systems that could maybe, maybe reach a the 4 LY to Proxima Centuri within a human lifetime. But 124 LY is so far that even the Starshot proposal would take nearly 800 years to receive data back.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

Well... nothing? These kinds of news pop up from time to time, but that's the end of it. It's ridiculously far away, and there is little we can do, at least within any foreseeable time frame.

We won't be visiting any time soon. But news of (likely) life would increase funding for telescopes, and eventually we'd get some idea how common life is - which is an interesting little fact in itself.

The problem is, when would we get an answer? Even in the best case, that would be 240 years. But we don't have the capability of building probes which approach the speed of light, so with current technology, it is probably hundreds of thousands of years.

So the short term solution (in the order of decades) is improve the observation capabilities. More observations with the JWST should give a better idea what the next iteration of a space telescope for this job should be and give some motivation of accelerating building such a telescope. JWST itself took decades to build and deploy. It would be remarkable, if an improved telescope could be deployed in a 10 year time frame. Of course, an operational Starship would help a lot with that, as a lot of effort for JWST was the complex deployment mechanism.

We won't get the capability to build probes that approach the speed of light if we keep observing instead of beginning to build the probe.

Nobody said something about stopping building probes. That will continue and eventually lead to probes which might approach the speed of light. But the achievable targets for the next decades are planetary, not interstellar.

Nobody said anything about stopping building planetary probes.

If you want to send things there, I would say the best solution is to take this as evidence that interesting exoplanets exist, and to look for similar closer ones