How far away is the nearest star to our solar system?

Whenever I start getting stressed out about something, I remind myself that I am but a speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe. Does it help? Not really, but sometimes it takes me down a rabbit hole on the NASA website that’s pretty fun to explore.

Our galaxy alone is vast beyond human imagination. I also think it was really smart of Mars, Inc. to name a candy bar after it — that way I can easily remember that we live in the Milky Way galaxy. Because of where the Earth is located, it’s pretty difficult to try to count all the stars in our galactic neighborhood, but there are a lot of them — estimates range from at least 100 billion to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way alone.

That should give the Sun lots of options to make nearby star-friends. If we ever wanted to visit another star, how far would we need to go?