I love how some of the news outlets talk about the exoplanets as if they are close enough we could realistically get there.
Given the fastest space probe man has ever constructed travels at ~38,000mph, to travel at that speed to our nearest stars (Proxima/Alpha Centauri, at ~4.3 light years away) would take about 76,000 years. Keep in mind that a "light year" is a unit of distance, "the distance light travels in a year", or ~5.8 trillion miles.
Now, at that same speed, Kepler-452b, which is about 1400 light years away would take 1400/4.3=~325 times as long, or about 25 million years. One way. It's all great to think about, and it's fantastic that our science has advanced far enough that we can identify details at such a distance, but our current space propulsion technology doesn't realistically allow for us to get there even in thousands of generations. Even if we could travel at anywhere close to the speed of light (which we can't), Kepler-452b is still ~1400+ years away.
Considering that 38,000 mph is about 1/17648 or 0.0000566 * the speed of light. We still have some work to do before we're able to travel at 0.0001c, much less 0.5c.
Interstellar distances are so huge that us puny humans have nothing even remotely close that we can compare them to. As Bill Bryson said in "A Short History of Nearly Everything", "these distances are so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us."
Even if you scale the earth down to ~1ft in diameter, Alpha/Proxima Centauri (~4.3ly) is about 600,000 miles away. Now multiply that by ~325 and you'll get the scale distance to Kepler-452b. So at the earth=1ft scale, Kepler-452b is still 195 million miles, or over 2x the actual distance from the Earth to the Sun.
Not exactly somewhere that you can go for the weekend :)
