Is there alien life close enough for us to actually make contact some day? Most of the research I’ve done on interstellar travel, alien planets and the conditions necessary for complex life to develop have led me to believe that the chance of laying eyes on alien life was a very distant (as in light years distant) hope.
Never say never.
Scientists recently discovered a planet in Alpha Centauri, which includes the three stars nearest to earth. The newly discovered planet orbits the closest star, Alpha Proxima, a small red dwarf, in the “goldilocks zone.” That means it’s close enough to its star for the planet to have liquid water. Currently identified as Proxima b, the planet is 1.3 times the size of earth and orbits four million miles from its star every eleven days. By comparison earth is 93 million miles from the sun. But Proxima is much smaller than our sun—just a little larger than Jupiter. (For more details, check out earthsky.com at http://earthsky.org/space/next-nearest-star-has-a-planet)
Proxima is just four light years from our sun, so if we manage to achieve light speed travel at some point in the future—not an impossibility considering a Mexican scientist has already developed a mathematical model for a warp drive, that would be a realistic target.
Of course, besides speed, we have a myriad of other technical problems to solve before humans could traverse open space, among which are the long-term effects of weightlessness and cosmic radiation, for which we have no adequate shielding once we fly beyond the protection of earth’s magnetic field.
First we have to figure out how to get humans as far as Mars. One thing at a time. But we can all dream (and write great science fiction)!
