The distance to our nearest neighbor star beyond the Sun is Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is approximately 4.4 light years. This means that the light emanating from it reaches us here on Earth in 4.4 years. Curiously, when we look at this star, or any star, we're actually seeing information from the past. Another way to consider the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri is in terms our own distance to the sun. Alpha Centauri is about 277,000 times further away than our sun is - approximately 25.7 Trillion miles! It would take Voyager 1 about 77,000 years to reach our nearest neighbor star, and it's not even heading in that direction! Clearly if humans are going to expand their horizon, a different approach will have to be devised. Consider project Breakthrough Starshot, an idea that would ferry very tiny probes with a mass of only a gram across space via a system known as a Light Sail.

Despite the immense technical and engineering challenges, how is this entire vision consistent with Newton's Second Law of Motion and the relationship Fnet = ma?