Found out about this regarding the Pleiades

Sooo as you may know The Pleiades is a small cluster of stars located top right of the Orion constellation. To the naked eye we can see about 6 stars but the cluster is made up of at least 600 stars. From what I can glean from internet searches is that the average distance between two stars in the cluster is under a light year and that got me wondering. Imagine if humans developed on a planet around one of those stars and other star systems are so close to us. Would our space exploration be different. We are talking about sending small probes to proxima which is over 4 light years away - imagine if it was just half a light year or less?