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Last Updated: Monday July 20 2009 13:42 GMT

Will we ever reach the stars?

The Antennae galaxies

Not with the spaceships we have now. The problem is the vast distances between Earth and everything else in space.

Even space probes launched more than 20 years ago have only reached the far reaches of our Solar System.

It would take them tens of thousands of years to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.

Even if a spaceship travelled at the speed of light it would take eight minutes to reach our sun, but four YEARS to reach the nearest star.