The fastest spacecraft built to date, Voyager 1, is racing away from the sun at 38,027 miles per hour. Even with current technology, however, interstellar travel is conceivable on the kind of timescales we’re talking about. Perhaps our descendants will have mastered near-light-speed travel. The star-hopping eraįortunately, Laughlin points out, there are 200 billion other stars in the Milky Way, most with planets of their own.
But the message is clear: Life will be impossible in our solar system.
“The exact dates depend on how much mass you estimate the sun will lose and how much planets will move,” Kaltenegger says. About 8 billion years from now, the flaring sun will make conditions intolerably hot all the way out past Pluto.
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