Earth-like planet spotted orbiting Sun’s closest star

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29638529

Of course that doesn't necessarily preclude a nearby higher level Kardashev Civilization becoming interested in all the noise we're making and heading over.

As we put up systems beyond Webb, it may be possible to observe a hypothetical inbound craft / fleet some years off, which would have interesting effects on our current human society, once it became generally known..

My suspicion is that the social media generation would react a lot worse than the radio generation did to the 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds:

https://www.space.com/40435-finding-aliens-humanity-reaction...

The current fastest man-man object is the Helios 2 space-probe, reaching something like 25 000 kilometres per hour. Proxima Centauri is 1.3020 parsecs away from Earth.

So, just diving one by the other, we'd looking at something like 18 000 years as a rough order of magnitude for sending something from Earth to Proxima Centauri.

You'd be much better off waiting, well, even a thousand years for technology to improve rather than sending something now.

Note: this is a very dodgy line of reasoning. The Helios probe got a massive speed boost from a close encounter with the sun. But even if the speed is wrong by a factor of ten, we're still looking at somewhere between a thousand and a hundred-thousand years.