A fly by at relativistic speeds would be an accomplishment but what data are you realistically capturing?

And Wikipedia captures my critique of it accurately:

> According to The Economist, at least a dozen off-the-shelf technologies will need to improve by orders of magnitude

That’s about right. That kind of orders of magnitude improvement within a lifetime requires novel scientific theories (eg similar to quantum mechanics and the impact it had). Without that growth is drastically slower. And consider that even computational and communication capabilities have basically been maxed out at our current tech level - we’re no longer growing them exponentially due to thermal and physics constraints.

It’s an ambitious goal worth doing because of the “if you aim for the moon and miss you still hit the stars” kind of effect. And there’s plenty of directed research that needs to be funded. Thinking any of this happens in our lifetimes is ambitious and spaceships carrying humans going to the stars is fantasy*

* as always, completely new physics that upend our knowledge of what’s possible changes the calculus. But those come very rarely and there’s no reason to believe the next revolution will be as impactful as quantum mechanics in terms of impact on our technological capabilities.