It should be a goal for Earth to send a probe to one of those stars. As the probe will be unmaned, a mission taking a hundred years or more is not out of question.

There are already plans to reach alpha centauri in about 20 years with unmanned probes (1). There still remain some technical hurdles in terms of the laser design to propel these probes afaik but it seems like this could be solved with more funding.

Too bad we are in the current era of eschewing scientific research in favor of crony politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

One issue with the latter is that tech is likely to advance fast enough that a subsequent probe launched a couple of decades later would overtake the first probe.

Regarding the former, various studies have been made and will certainly continue to be made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Designs_an...

Exploration of the Very Local Interstellar Medium (VLISM) will likely come first: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-022-00943-x

As someone who has been fascinated by the universe and galaxies from a young age, I too thought interstellar was the way to go. Nowadays, however, I've started to feel that we've been wrongly conditioned by science fiction to see interstellar exploration as the next logical step for humanity.

Our species is still very immature ethically, socially, and politically. We haven't even learned to accept each other and co-exist happily on Earth. Our distant hominin ancestors crossed entire continents but today we set up physical borders and cultural barriers to prevent even neighborly visits. We certainly won't become the broad-minded united ethical species that Star Trek TOS/TNG portrayed within the next 2-3 centuries.

Gradual spatial expansion, and through that, gradual cognitive and worldview expansion, has been our track record. Whenever things got hairy for someone in our hominin tree at any time, they moved just a little bit more to survive.

So, I feel exploring and settling other solar system bodies should be our next logical step. There are 4 solid planets, 5 dwarf planets, and as per Gemini, ~40 moons, ~3000 asteroid belt objects, and 200000+ Kuiper belt objects, all above 10 km radius. That's a lot of nearby space to explore and more practical than interstellar. Some of them will become the solutions or refuges from our current social and political problems on Earth.

It'll take us 1000s of years more, maybe even 100s of 1000s, to do all this. Including a lot of violence, conflicts and injustice. But eventually, we will learn to develop the cooperative institutions and cognitive/ethical frameworks we currently lack to become a multi-planet species. Interplanetary cooperative institutions and technologies will emerge eventually, just like today we have airplanes, the Internet, UN, WHO, EU - institutions and technologies that, while far from perfect, seemed downright unlikely for 100s of 1000s of years of our hominin history.

Sadly if an alien civilization sent a probe to the Sun, would we even know?

How would it be powered?