Would humanity ever consider sending ships on interstellar voyages when technology would likely advance to overtake said ship within decades?

 

It’s a very common sci-fi trope that we send ships on interstellar voyages, but as technology advances, these ships are overtaken by newer designs that arrive decades or centuries earlier. Would this happen in real life?

The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light-years away. It would take 430 years to get there at 1% of the speed of light. At our current state of technological sophistication, we don’t have the technology to achieve such speeds. Furthermore, 430 years is so long that it’s hard to imagine a structure that could withstand such a journey for over four centuries and still function. Washing machines break in ten to fifteen years.

We don’t know what the future holds. One hundred years ago, Quantum Mechanics was just being developed, and now we use it in electronics all around us. But to say anything with confidence, we need to use the knowledge that we currently have. Our politics have too short an attention span to embark on projects on which budget would need to be assigned for hundreds of years and would take multiple and subsequent human lives to finish.

One of the most prolonged missions ever undertaken was the New Horizon mission, which reached Pluto in 9.5 years and then performed a fly-by near the transneptunian object 486958 Arrokoth four years later. Voyagers are still functional after 50 years and are 0.5 billion km/0.3 billion miles a year further away from us.

Once we send something, it will most likely be general intelligence robotic missions. Even this sort of technology is still beyond our scope for now. The supplies to send humans would take up too much space and would take up whole human lives unless suspended animation technology is ever developed.

Considering our most extended missions, these must arrive at the destination within about a hundred years. To get to Alpha Centauri, they would need to achieve about 2.5% of the speed of light. The newer, faster missions would need much better speeds to overtake them. It isn’t easy to imagine them achieving speeds close to the speed of light so that they arrive there a few decades earlier.

Nevertheless, I really hope I’m wrong, and there will be a currently impossible-to-predict way to achieve speeds close to the speed of light and easily send missions to all nearby star systems. It would be immensely fascinating.