The fastest human-made (physical object) ever is Helios Two which travels at about .02% the speed of light. It takes 5000 years to travel the distance that man-made light signals would travel in one year.
The next nearest star (with any sort of planets) would take Helios Two 40,000 years to travel to and back.
But the first star with a planet very very very close to Earth in features (and thus supporting intelligent life) could easily be 100 light years away - taking Helios Two a million years to travel to and back to visit our closest relatives.
So we decide to 'can' the holiday vacation to this particular paradise -pity because Jill Tarter's fund-raising SETI brochure looked so nice : no summer vacation is that long - not even for Canadian MPs.
But since we got a signal from Planet X's beings (but we can't figure anything about the language it is in), we decide to type out a brief texting message back in English (hey it works with foreign waiters, doesn't it ?).
And we wait and wait and wait (100 years) for the reply.
Rather we don't - our great-great-grandchildren wait for the reply.
Long distance ping-pong.
And since the Chinese also invented water torture as well as ping pong, call it the slow drip,drip version ping pong.
Yawn --- or maybe, SCREAM !!!!!!......
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