Travelling to Gliese 581d

This is Gliese 581d it's a large rocky earth like planet the nearest known it just possible that this world or one like it could in the future become home to the human race a second century against the unforgiving blackness of space. Discovered in 2007 it seven times bigger tha earth It orbits a star smaller and redder than our own it lies just the right distance from its sun to allow water to exist on the surface but even if this is the perfect home away from home there is a fundamental problem we have to over come Gliese is a very very long way away more than 20 light years that's 120,000,000,000,000 miles to get some idea of this extraordinary distance then the challenge it presents I'm going to imagine that we could hitch a ride on the fastest man-made object in existence voyager 1 was launched in 1977 now over 30 years old it's Travelled more than 13,000,000 miles its mission so far has taken it to Jupiter and Saturn by using their gravity to boost the speed  little spacecraft has entered the record it might not look fast but voyager is racing through space at 11 miles a second on Earth 11 miles a second looks like 39,000 miles an hour at this speed we could circle the globe one an a half times in an hour so how long would it take a space shot travelling at voyager speed to get to the nearest earth like planet Gliese the answer reveals the true scale of the cosmos even travelling 11 miles a second the journey to Gliese would still take over 350 thousand years I think we have a chance to become a lasting part of the ever changing universe and discover what other wonders it might hold but to do this we have to developed a new technology on the enormous scale and that's going to take some serious engineering if we could build a machine capable of travelling to other solar systems we'd open up a fascinating possibility the survival of the human race billions of years present day engineers have begun thinking about the principles of building such a ship, it could use atomic energy or perhaps more exotic fuels such as antimatter supplying it with enormous amounts of power yet I think the main challenges won't be technical the first will be finincial the cost of constructing an interstellar spacecraft would be huge and for the society that made it there would be little payback they would never see It again 

So constructing this greater machine will either be the greatest act of generosity in history or it will have to be funded by the travelling themselves and that raises the the second problem even if it could travel the mind numbingly fast say a thousand times faster than voyager 11,000 miles a second, a journey to the nearest Star system will still take "seventy three" years