DARPA To Sponsor R&D For Interstellar Travel

Apocryphos writes "The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars. In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, plans to award some lucky, ambitious and star-struck organization roughly $500,000 in seed money to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically — to send humans to another star, a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years."

Comments

cool

[Froeschle]

It's nice to see that there is still at least some ambition left in our society.

Re:FTFY

[shadowfaxcrx]

Well, you did say it was flushing money down the toilet, which was a pretty unfounded claim considering you spouted it on an invention that was funded by DARPA.

The whole POINT of DARPA is to throw money at projects that aren't likely to succeed right away, because if DARPA doesn't do it, no one will and it will never get done.

The internet never would have happened if DARPA hadn't flushed money down the toilet for it, because when the internet/arpanet was first being assembled, no one saw any sort of profitability in large networks of computers - and in fact when the idea first started being looked at in 1968 no one saw profitability in consumer computers at all.