>imagine how many more interesting things they could do with it than fly to nowhere?
Like what?
Like power an entire planet for centuries, or use it as the energy budget for a megastructure project like a Dyson swarm.
We're talking about a truly incomprehensible amount of energy, not just to carry the rocket and its own fuel, but the tens of thousands of kg of water and food for even a modest compliment of people.
18 years is a LONG time after all.
For context, the most powerful chemical rockets peak around 450s-530s. A nuclear rocket of the sort we can build today would be more than twice that value, and super-efficient ion thrusters can have IspS in the tens of thousands of seconds.
But we're talking about an engine with a specific impulse measured in decades, and as far as anyone knows that means having catastrophic amounts of antimatter. I don't think plucky explorers on a one-way trip are going to have access to a small moon's worth of antimatter, and if they did, imagine how many more interesting things they could do with it than fly to nowhere?