Imagine yourself a young man--a helping hand on a farm--frustrated with the day-in, day-out work. Farm work is hard. You really don’t have the build for it--your friends always call you ‘skinny’. You do have a knack for fixing the farm machinery, though, and your step-parents, who own the farm, find that a very useful thing.

Okay, so the universe is so huge there must be some intelligent life out there, Kepler is finding lots of planets relatively nearby, and Voyager 1 has found some things about interstellar space to be careful about . . .

But if we want to send probes (or even humans!!!) to nearby stars--where do we aim our spacecraft?!? Is that type of interstellar travel even remotely possible?!?

Our Galactic Neighborhood