Mark Medley is The Globe and Mail’s Deputy Opinion Editor. He is the author of Live to See the Day: Impossible Goals, Unimaginable Futures, and the Pursuit of Things That May Never Be, from which the following essay has been partly adapted.

Earlier this week, my family sat around the dining room table and shared their resolutions for 2026. My 10-year-old son vowed to learn five songs on his new electric guitar; my wife, who creates a bingo card outlining her aims for the next 12 months, rattled off an impressive list, explaining in detail how this would be the year she truly changed her life.

I sat in silence, trying to think of something, anything, I wanted to accomplish. Frankly, I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. Mine tend to be boring, uninspiring, obvious: Go to the gym twice a week; brush up on my French; put more of my paycheque into an RRSP. Most years, if I made one at all, I’ve forgotten about it – okay, consciously abandoned it – by the end of January.

The curious thing is that for the past six years I’ve been thinking almost non-stop about goals – and what is a New Year’s resolution if not a goal you hope to complete before you need to buy another calendar? My obsession, however, has been goals of a different sort – not a vow to read more books or eat healthier or spend less money – but goals the pursuers knew from the outset were unlikely to be realized in their lifetime, that might only come to pass decades or centuries or even millenniums from now. Goals that most people would consider to be impossible.

These didn’t include New Year’s resolutions, of course. But as I sat there, eating dinner with my family, thinking about what I could choose as my goal for 2026, it struck me that maybe I’d been going about it the wrong way. That maybe the key to the perfect resolution is to pick something you know you’ll never achieve.

Hipparchus working in his Alexandria observatory with telescope and orbital models in a book illustration from 1880.Getty Images

Several years ago, I travelled to Tucson, Ariz., for a spaceship convention. Specifically, a symposium organized by the Interstellar Research Group (IRG), the pre-eminent gathering in the world – and possibly the galaxy – for those who’ve dedicated their lives to leaving this same world behind.

This is a resolution that will take vastly longer than 365 days to complete. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, is located 4.2 light years from the Earth. A light year, in case the term isn’t obvious enough, is the distance light travels in a year, and converting one into a common unit of measure boggles the mind: 9.46 trillion kilometres. Light travels fast – over 1 billion kilometres an hour – but even at that speed it would take, um, 4.2 years to reach Proxima, the smallest member of the Alpha Centauri triple star system. We cannot go that fast. Voyager 1, which began its journey in 1977 and in 2012 became the first human-made craft to enter interstellar space, travels a leisurely 61,000 kilometres an hour. At that pace it would take about 75,000 years to arrive at Proxima, which paradoxically means “nearest” in Latin – not exactly a weekend getaway. We shouldn’t pack our suitcases quite yet.

And yet all the people I encountered throughout the weekend wanted to try. It pained me how much they wanted to try. The symposium was attended by a wide variety of stargazers – hobbyists tinkering away in their garages and academics sporting CVs stretching to the moon-and-back and NASA-affiliated engineers and literal rocket scientists with the backing of deep-pocketed space exploration startups. The one thing everyone who descended upon this desert city had in common was that they’d devoted their lives, or at........

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