Yes—but the answer depends enormously on what we mean by interstellar trip.
The video you linked is “Why Humans Can’t Survive Deep Space.” Its emphasis is well placed: the main obstacle is not that crossing to another star violates physics. It does not. The problem is that a biological human being is an extraordinarily inconvenient payload for an interstellar spacecraft.
I would divide the question into three levels.
1. Can an object made by humans enter interstellar space?
Already done.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have crossed the heliopause into interstellar space; Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to do so. But that is very different from reaching another star.
At Voyager-like speeds, getting to the vicinity of Alpha/Proxima Centauri would take roughly 75,000–80,000 years.
So:
interstellar space = already achieved
interstellar star travel = another matter entirely.
2. Can we send a robotic probe to another star?
Here I would say probably yes, in principle, and perhaps within this or the next century.
The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.2 light-years away.
The most credible radically faster concept at present is not a giant rocket but an extremely small probe propelled by an external beam—essentially laser + light sail.
Breakthrough Starshot is explicitly studying gram-scale uncrewed spacecraft accelerated toward roughly 0.2c, 20% of light speed. At that velocity, Alpha Centauri becomes roughly a 20–25 year trip, followed by another ~4.3 years before its signal gets back to Earth.
This doesn’t require warp drives or new physics.
It requires fantastically difficult engineering: enormous laser arrays, ultralight sails that survive acceleration, precise beam riding, surviving collisions with interstellar dust at relativistic velocity, autonomous navigation, and somehow transmitting useful data over four light-years.
But those are engineering problems rather than obvious violations of known physical law.
And that distinction is very important:
Robotic interstellar travel is no longer pure science fiction. Human interstellar travel mostly still is.
3. Could
you and I
travel to another star?
Here the video becomes particularly relevant.
Suppose we want to reach Proxima within a human lifetime. Even at:
- 1% c → ~420 years
- 10% c → ~42 years
- 20% c → ~21 years
- 50% c → ~8.4 years as measured from Earth, ignoring acceleration/deceleration
The arithmetic isn’t really the worst problem.
The problem is carrying a 70-kg warm, wet, metabolically demanding mammal and everything required to keep it alive.
A human starship needs:
radiation shielding + atmosphere + water + food + waste recycling + temperature regulation + gravity or countermeasures + medicine + redundancy + psychological viability + decades of faultless life support.
And every kilogram then has to be accelerated—and eventually decelerated.
That makes energy grow brutally.
For example, just the classical kinetic energy of a 100-ton spacecraft at 0.1c is of order
4.5\times10^{19}\ {\rm J},
before accounting for propulsion efficiency, fuel, braking, shielding, and relativistic effects.
That’s roughly many months of present global electricity production concentrated into one vehicle; realistic propulsion requirements would be considerably larger. Studies of relativistic flight emphasize precisely this enormous energy and radiation burden.
And then comes something visually innocuous but frightening:
Dust.
At 0.1–0.2c, a tiny grain of interstellar dust is no longer merely dust.
In the spacecraft frame it becomes a hypervelocity projectile. Hydrogen atoms become significant ionizing radiation. Shielding that makes sense at normal spacecraft velocities becomes a very different problem at relativistic speed.
This is one of the things Star Trek quietly removes with its imaginary deflector shields.
Therefore the really interesting question may be: what travels?
This is where I think the subject becomes much more interesting than merely asking for a better rocket.
There are several increasingly radical possibilities:
A. Human body goes.
Fusion/antimatter spacecraft, enormous shielding, perhaps decades-long voyage.
B. Human generations go.
A generation ship: the people arriving are descendants of those who departed.
C. Metabolism nearly stops.
Artificial hibernation / suspended animation. NASA itself notes that very long human voyages would require exotic capabilities such as suspended animation or multigenerational life support.
D. Robots go.
Far easier. This is probably our first true interstellar expedition.
E. AI goes.
Now things become radically different.
An AI does not need oxygen, food, exercise, sleep, companionship, or necessarily Earthlike temperature. If components can be hardened and repaired, travel time becomes much less important.
A 200-year journey is absurd for an individual human.
For a machine it may merely be:
200 years of transit.
F. Information goes.
And this is the truly posthuman version.
Instead of sending a human body across 4 light-years, transmit enough information to reconstruct something at the destination—provided robotic infrastructure already exists there.
Then interstellar migration becomes less like:
Columbus crossing the Atlantic
and more like:
sending a pattern across a network.
And here I would slightly reverse the title of that video.
The deepest point may not be:
“Humans can’t survive deep space.”
It may eventually be:
Deep space reveals how contingent the human body is as the vehicle of intelligence.
The solar system is roughly human-scaled enough that bodies may remain passengers.
The galaxy probably isn’t.
That leads to a rather striking sequence:
Earth → human travels
Solar system → human + machine travels
interstellar space → machine travels
galaxy → information travels.
And this connects very directly to the question we’ve repeatedly touched on about what remains of the human in an AI world. Interstellar distances impose an almost merciless selection pressure against the biological form: the intelligence may be able to leave long before the organism that produced it can.
So my answer would be:
Interstellar travel is physically possible; interstellar probes are plausibly achievable; interstellar human travel remains extraordinarily difficult. The first intelligence from Earth to reach another star is much more likely to be machine intelligence than Homo sapiens sitting inside a spacecraft.
And there is one further irony: if one day we receive evidence of an extraterrestrial technological civilization, we should perhaps expect exactly the same thing—the thing arriving here may not be the aliens, but their Voyager, AI, or descendants thereof.
I can also keep an eye on major developments in interstellar propulsion and let you know when something crosses from proposal into demonstrated technology.
