Even at light speed it's twenty years away.. and given this speed is never going to be possible for humanity, or us getting as far as the end of even our own 'little' solar-system, the prospects look bleak for genuine contact for this world. I did read something in the New scientist not so long ago basically saying the time was about right for launching probes to planets like at this distance due to the gravitational advantages of our own planetary bodies, but of course can't find it. It is in their archives, somewhere.. Just to chuck in the realistic physics here, but if we ever got a starship to that now redunant planetoid, Pluto, it would have achieved 1/72,000th of the size of our own solar system; ie: nowehere fast. At our own sun's gravitational influence's extreme edge, it wouldn't even be the brightest stella body in the sky. Just a distant spec, still exerting it's influence. Faster-than-light interstella travel? Emm.. where is everybody. Even a very conservative one hundred million years for an interstella civilization to florish and conquer/contact the stars, or even leave any discernable trace hasn't happened, unless you proscribe to conspiricies like Roswell, 9/11 was a Bush plot/my grandad didn't witness Nazi-holocaust camps, etc. Where are these advanced civilations? We should have detected even the slightest traces of their 'time travel' by now. They've had all the time in the universe don't forget if you believe breaking the rules of physics is a practical alternative to the reality in front of us.. Edit:The article I couldn't find last night, or some of it.. Oh and another one from the same learned journal, perhaps rubbishing half of my post, perhaps not..