Traveling 40 light-years would take a very long time with current or near-term propulsion. At the fastest speeds achieved by human-made spacecraft to date, the journey would require on the order of many thousands of years. To put it in perspective:

• If traveling at the Parker Solar Probe’s record speed of about 192 km/s (roughly 0.000064% of the speed of light), a 40-light-year distance would take roughly 73,000+ years.
• Even optimistic future propulsion concepts that reach a significant fraction of the speed of light (for example, a few percent of light speed) would still yield travel times of decades to a few centuries, not a human lifetime.

Key concepts to keep in mind:

• A light-year is the distance light travels in one year; at light speed, 40 light-years would take 40 years, which is far faster than any current or realistically near-future human-made craft can achieve.
• Realistic interstellar travel depends on breakthroughs in propulsion (e.g., fusion, antimatter, laser sails) and onboard life-support, food, and shielding for long durations, all of which present monumental engineering challenges.

If you’d like, I can break down travel times for specific hypothetical speeds (e.g., 1% of light speed, 10% of light speed) and outline what tech advances would be needed to make such speeds feasible.