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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."
I wonder where the money is REALLY going...
http://www.stltoday.com/news/science/article_3eb9f408-c955-11e0-8349-001a4bcf6878.html
and
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/08/darpas-very-expensive-sci-fi-projects-future/41427/
and
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/science/space/18starship.html?_r=1&hp&gwh=30EB3709176A86B1A438FEC050C5C291
This article showed up elsewhere over a month ago:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/nerds-darpa-wants-your-advice-on-interstellar-flight/
1. Invent internet
2. Invest in travelling to other stars
3. Expand internet to said stars
4. ???
5. Profit!
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
DARPA To Flush More Taxpayer Money Down the Toilet
FTFY.
I have a crazy idea. Instead of flushing this money down the toilet, why don't we use it to pay the government's debt instead?
Maybe we'll get some good sci-fi stories out of the submissions.
Esp since the first [insert quantity here] submissions will be previous sci-fi story lines.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
It's nice to see that there is still at least some ambition left in our society.
Until FTL travel becomes a possibility
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
a challenge of such magnitude that the study alone could take a hundred years.
Uh, no. The research and infrastructure buildup necessary to actually carry out such a mission could easily take over a hundred years. But if the _study_ on what would be necessary to do it takes a hundred years, or even ten, then you're doin it rong.
Also, if the study takes over 100 years, the grant works out to $5000 a year. Although perhaps the kind of organization that operates on $5000 a year would take awhile to get things done...
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
3 SS Modules (1 habitation, 1 life support, 1 solar), 2 SS Components (1 fuel, 1 propulsion), and 8 SS Structural to put them together... of course, more points for more modules.
Is a bit more than support for one graduate student for five years. Almost nothing, in other words.
$500k stretched over 100 years isn't going to do much research. $500k over 1 year will produce a paper that says we'll need a lot more money
At last we will be able to get rid of all of those useless hairdressers, telephone sanitisers and middle management types.
some lucky government contractor is going to get a half mil for coming up with some bullshit, we wont possibly be able to test anytime in the foreseeable future
your tax dollars at work, hey darpa, I hear Joplin could use some new schools for the future that is here and now ...
I mean, if it's going to take 100 years, then that $500k seems like a good investment if we're going to be hiring a whole team of "researchers" full time. But I suspect that 500k isn't really going to be stretched that thin ;-)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
$500,000 for a hundred-year study? No wonder we aren't attracting people to science & engineering these days.
It sounds like someone at DARPA is just *really* upset over Stargate Universe being cancelled.
Yeah, I saw this twilight zone episode. It didn't go too well for the guy's psyche.
Get a web developer
Where are the private investors? The billionaires with more money than they know what to do with? How come none of them are sponsoring anything related to space? Is it just too high risk? How much would $20 billion buy? Or even $10 billion, or $5 Billion?
i know how you can get over the whole motivation issue, tell the crew on the ISS that zombies have overtaken the earth and everyone dead, well part from the person telling them, they quite clever i'm sure they can knock something up and be at Alpha Centuari in a jiffy, no flaws in this plan, just make sure it not an all male crew.
Don't they realize that faster than light travel has been proven to be impossible? I think that all the spaceship sci-fi crap has caused too many otherwise intelligent people to focus their efforts in such fruitless endeavors where they would otherwise be able to research things that really do help society as a whole.
I rarely say this. I am always willing to spend money for basic research, where an immediate benefit is not obvious. But interstellar travel? Now? Ridiculous. Baby steps, please. Such a project for a permanent station on the dark side of the moon would already be very ambitious, but at least not totally scifi. Next step a permanent space station on Mars. If this can be accomplished and is more or less routine, it might start to make sense to think about interstellar travel. But certainly not earlier.
How do I apply for the Seed Money?
I already have a British police call box in my garage. But there are some interior sizing issues.
Once human consciousness can be stored in a machine, we can send relatively slow, machine-manned interstellar ships to explore the galaxy.
The 100 year starship project is supposed to study what it will take to sustain private sector investment into a long range program of building a starship.
http://www.100yss.org/about.html
It is not itself a 100 year project to build a starship, or a 100 year project to figure out how to sustain investment...
Also, if you're interested in interstellar research, check out Centauri Dreams:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/
if anyone wanted to spend any time with earthlings at all, well, they would have built an interstellar highway is all i'm sayin'....
Good people go to bed earlier.
The private investors are investing in things like non-orbital launch systems (Virgin Galactic/Scaled Composites); orbital launch systems (SpaceX); and orbital space stations/hotels (Bigelow Aerospace). All of these private ventures would never have happened if it weren't for almost half a century of government funding of NASA and the Air Force before that.
There are whole classes of radical advancements that, simply, can't happen without significant initial investment without a guarantee of success. Examples of such things include space travel and the nuclear bomb. Historically, some of these kinds of discoveries have been made because an individual monarch was willing to take a gamble (ex. Queen Isabella funding Columbus) but modern business structures are designed to work against such things because they are often wastes of money (ex. the search for El Dorado and the fountain of youth).
When it comes to traveling to other stars, there are obvious advantages to be had to science as well as humanity as a whole. On the other hand, even if it works in the end, there are no obvious profits to be made on it with our current understanding of science. Any resources we find in a distant solar system would be so hard to transport back to Earth that it'd be cheaper to just manufacture it (atom by atom) in a particle accelerator (which we could do with present technology). In such cases, governmental spending is the ONLY way for it to get done.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
I wouldn't say I have mixed feelings, since some things don't mix well.
on one hand, I think investigation into interstellar travel is cool, and would be nice to see someone working on, even if just to see what comes out of the research. Long term, very cool projects.
On the other hand... I thought that foreign wars were stretching it for a "Defense Department". Interstellar travel? What exactly are they defending against?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere.
The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts, and the need to cover it with the equivalent of bathroom tiles.
There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.
Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.
What NASA should be doing is creating rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which when combined make very good rocket fuel, because of Newton's third law.
Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safe vacuum of space, no atmosphere = no friction = no heat = no bathroom tiles and no foam shielding on the external fuel tank.
Less bathroom tiles + insulation foam = less rocket fuel = less pollution in the Mexican Gulf.
Once we can accelerate and decelerate space craft with rocket fuel that is obtained from outside of the earth's gravity well, space travel becomes cheaper by many orders of magnitude, ok the capital cost would be very high, but once the systems are in place, the number of human beings, living in space increases exponentially.
A good example for the way very high capital cost projects work, is the Panama canal.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
If they can do it, why can't we? Maybe the government knows something that we don't. (Queue spooky music)
Think about it. Launches are expensive. Spaceflight is expensive. Nobody has found a pure gold asteroid, and even if they did it would take more money to get any of the gold back to Earth than the gold would be worth. Communications satellites only exist because the phone companies can charge users a fortune in bills over decades.
Private investors don't give a shit about technology, and certainly certainly not for technology that has no possibility of a financial return.
Remember, billionaires got that way because they're damn stingy and only give in order to get more. Wannabe billionaires are even more that way. Where they donate, it is purely for tax reasons. (They can offset all the taxes from income and capital gains and still make a fortune.) It's not for charity and it's certainly not for the benefit of industrialists who could become rich if the technology pays off. This isn't even putting the billionaires down at all. This is simply the logic of economics and it is the logic of economics that create the uber-wealthy in the first place.
The ONLY people who have both the money AND the incentive to do this kind of work is government. That is why the US and USSR have space programs and Argentinia (which had no shortage of private individuals with know-how for sale after the war) does not. If private investors had any motivation to actually do something in space (as opposed to paying an agency to lob yet another radio/tv/bittorrent relay into orbit), it would have already happened. The closest we've seen yet are Virgin Galactic (which doesn't even reach orbit) and some guys launching small rockets from old oil rig platforms (who, incidentally, you don't hear much about these days).
As for half a million - it might sound a lot but it would pay for five mid-grade private sector researchers for a year. Not equipment, computers, space, or anything else, just the salaries of those five people. Public sector workers would be cheaper - you could get easily two or three times as many - but this is funding for a private effort so you're limited to five. This research is going to require pushing what we know about human hibernation to the absolute limits. It is going to require some amazing work on radiation shielding. In order for the people on board to develop normally, it is going to require some fantastic developments in materials science (you will need a vehicle 3/4 of a mile in diameter to be able to develop artificial gravity without inducing motion sickness - and then you will need to figure out how to put that vehicle in orbit).
And, yes, those are mid-grade researchers. Top-end researchers in the private sector would limit you to two or three people, which wouldn't even get you enough to have one specialist per major problem to be solved.
This is another reason the private sector is a Bad Choice for this kind of work. Public sector scientists are much much cheaper and, since they have access to shared regional or national computation resources, don't require as much money to get a project like this off the ground. The private sector is simply not cost-effective for this kind of work.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Great response. At least there are a few moguls out there who are trying to make a business out of space. Tourism is a noble business, if not as romantic as groundbreaking scientific exploration. I can't wait for the space hotels. Once big business figures out how to get the infrastructure in place, other advances should follow in quick succession. There will be a tipping point.
I've already sent them my SWITS (Single Wide Interstellar Travel Standard) for adoption. NASA refused it but I think these guys are a lot smarter. I've even included weight restrictions for duct tape.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
http://www.gocomics.com//nonsequitur/2011/07/08
From what I have seen it would take from thousands to tens of thousands of years to travel to the nearest star. Instead of having generations upon generations living and growing up on a ship, with only the first generation actually having a choice in the matter, I have a better solution. Send DNA. "Grow" humans once you get there. Assuming we can even build something that can last that long, you send a ship with the tech to grow a human outside of the womb. If the ship gets there and there is no viable planet for sustaining life then you don't start the "growing" process. If it gets there and we find an Earth-like planet that has a chance to sustain life, then "grow" a small set of males and females which would then be the first generation of humans to seed that planet. Sure its a bit far fetched from what is possible today, but it seems to me to be way more viable than sending people on a 20000 year trip not knowing if it will ever result in success. Can you imagine being one of the generations to grow up in the middle of a trip if were were to just ship people off in to oblivion? I would be pissed knowing I will never see Earth or even the destination, and rather be confined to a ship my entire life, since I grew up in say year 1000 of a 20000 year trip. Unless we can prove Einstein wrong and travel the speed of light, I thinking "growing" humans at the destination is the only viable way.
Hope it would go better than the Falcon test flights. 9 minutes into the flight, "Sir, we have lost communication with the... "
I have a crazy idea. Instead of flushing this money down the toilet, why don't we use it to pay the government's debt instead?
And what would that achieve, exactly? You would reduce the overall balance sheet of the economy, since the government's debt may be less than it would otherwise be, but also somebody's assets are less.
It is futile to think about the cost of government in monetary terms. The only useful measure of cost of government is to think about whether the government's spending uses real resources (goods, services, human labor) that could otherwise have been enjoyed to further the well-being of private citizens in a better way.
So DARPA will employ scientists and engineers and support staff for more pie-in-the-sky research. That adds directly to economic activity, and will indirectly lead to new technology that can increase productivity. That's a pretty good use of real resources in my book.
And as far as the debt is concerned, you're simply worrying about a non-problem.
From what I have read on the subject of interstellar space travel, we need two mechanisms to be order to make the journey in a somewhat reasonable fashion:
1. Faster Than Light (FTL) travel
2. A habitat with artificial gravity of some sort.
FTL travel may not be as science fictiony as we think. Anyone remember the episode of Futurama where they explained how the ships engines worked? They worked by moving space around the ship rather than moving the ship around space. Thats sort of the concept behind what may turn out to be a real life warp drive. Take a pocket of space and move it rather than your ship in order to achieve superluminal speeds. The issue is that in order to do that you need some exotic stuff called negative energy, and so far its existence hasnt even been verified yet, and apparently if it does exist the only way to generate it would be to use the most powerful stuff in the universe: antimatter. And that stuff is so expensive you could spend every piece of currency on earth and not even get enough to make a paperweight from. So for now were stuck at sublight.
Artificial gravity isnt so hard. Any circular, spinning habitat will do. But I for one hope we can discover and learn to manipulate gravitons somehow in order to generate or counter gravity at will. That way we could actually build ships that look like the Enterprise and are livable inside for an average joe. It would also enable us to be 100% certain that we could colonize planets that dont have gravity similar to Earths, which I think is going to be very important if you are sending people out to explore the galaxy. Right now the biggest question in my mind with regards to the potential colonization of Mars or the Moon is how the human body will react to fractional gravity. We know how the human body reacts in microgravity, and obviously we know how it reacts in normal gravity, but we have no idea how life will be for people living day to day on planets with gravity just a fraction of the earths. If it is anything like microgravity and you have to stay active all the time, it will be unfeasible for anyone without military discipline to live a normal life because of the strict routine. Discovering how to use and manipulate gravity itself would allow us to fix that. We could augment the planets natural gravity with artificial gravity and bring it up to a point where any normal human could live there, thus enabling us to colonize worlds of any size as long as their gravity is less than 1g.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110810-antimatter-belt-earth-trapped-pamela-space-science/
Until FTL travel becomes a possibility
Not just FTL, but order-of-magnitude-faster-than-light with magic deflector shields so you didn't get vaporized if you collided with something big like a hydrogen atom. Or wormholes that can pass more than a squirt of randomized radiation.
Even traveling at ~1c will take a minimum of about 4 years, probably much more, to get to the nearest star (that depends on how your we-haven't-invented-it-yet space drive works - how long will you spend accelerating/decelerating, will you experience time dilation etc). You might need warp drive to get even close to 1c (e.g. in the Steven Baxter book Ark - they had warp drive but it still took decades to get to anywhere likely to have a habitable planet - and because it was a Stephen Baxter book everything went pear-shaped).
And even with a slower-than-light "generation ship" there's some hard questions to ask about the energy budget. I notice that even hard SF authors, when they use sublight travel, have been tending to go for imaginary power sources rather than assuming that good ol' nuclear power will let you get there in any reasonable time. (e.g. Stephen Baxter used grand-unified-theory drives, Alistair Reynolds has magic "conjoiner" drives... Greg Egan uses boring old antimatter, but assumes everybody can upload themselves to a computer and fit on a tiny spaceship).
Maybe the first step should be to work out how to build a self-sustaining colony in space: you'll need the same technology to build a generation ship, even if you build an OMFTL drive into a DeLorian you'll need to build a space motel in any star system that doesn't have a nice habitable planet and, if we never work out how to get out of the solar system, a few space colonies would be awfully useful when it came to exploiting the solar system without continually crawling in and out of gravity wells.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
For approximately one year (355 days) ought to get you very close to light speed!
You'd need substantial mass for shielding from the passive (free floating) hydrogen nuclei etc.
With time dilation trips of almost any distance should take about 2.8 years (ship time) even if
in real time it lasts millions of years.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Just ask Global Dynamics, they already have a mission to go to Titan.
First humans burn before coming even close to any star.
2. 100 years? http://dieoff.org/page125.htm
....for the paywalled link warning.
Our fastest current thruster, ION propulsion, can theoretically get us to the closest star in about 81,000 years -- about 2,700 human generations. Maybe some kind of self-sustaining ark spacecraft could do this. There is a completely theoretical idea of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion which could reach about 5% the speed of light which would make the trip about 85 years.
Leverage the lunar resources and build a mag-boost transportation(highway) to the moon. Power the magnetic boosting system ...) to pay for moving materials to the moon. As a side effect you have a magnetic
with large solar sails and collectors.That would hold it in place, power the gyro's and electro-magnetic boosters. Send materials
from the moon to earth(titanium, aluminum,
boosting system that could launch vessels at high speeds,just need to re-align the mag-boosters....
Still, 500,000 divided by 100 years, WOW, you mean DARPA would give me a whopping $5000 a year to research this? Where do I get in line (for the exit)?
- Good news everyone! Our spaceship has landed at our designated destination. - Yey! - Bad news is that it is around 6000 celsius degrees out there so our ship will melt in 1.53 seconds.
The whole POINT of DARPA is to throw money at projects
that have vital national defense applications for the USA. The Internet was built to enable reliable communications in the event of a nuclear war. Easy, direct application.
that aren't likely to succeed right away
right.
because if DARPA doesn't do it, no one will and it will never get done.
For interstellar travel this isn't DARPA's problem. NSF, maybe, but DARPA is over-funded at least to the degree it can spend money on this kind of project.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Therefore, the best bet for humanity's long-term survival is to get at least some of us off this rock at distances so vast that near-instantaneous travel from place to place is infeasible.
It's all true, but it has nothing to do with DARPA's mandate. They might as well work on faster-cooking spaghetti.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://feeds.nytimes.com/nyt/rss/Science
I (like many I'm sure) are sick of this fucking paywall so using this RSS feed in your favorite reader (I use Google Reader) allows you to read the content without having to pay them.
user@host$ diff
if $500,000 can "invent" anything useful for interstellar technolgies it already would have been. This is just a way of funnelling money into the hands of some connected people, directly or indirectly.
This reminds me of a Bloom County comic thread. Opus gets a grant from the government to build a missile defense system. He blows the money even thinking he bought Bolivia at one point. Eventually he finds out that he is getting called to the carpet to see his results and freaks out because he has not done anything.
Opus and friends come up with a ludicrous plan of gluing or sewing trillions of dollar bills together end to end to make a space wall to stop missiles. As they are on the floor of congress they propose this plan.. and ask at the end "Did you buy it?"
Next frame: News paper headline - "They bought it!"
I love bloom county.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
Around about 1990, I attended a talk by Robert L. Forward at Hughes Aircraft, where he reviewed the results of a study he had completed for the USAF regarding anti-matter propulsion, primarily regarding further development of anti-matter production and storage methods. A reasonably good introduction can be found here. It was fascinating, in large part because virtually every concrete step towards reliable production of "fuel" ended with the comment "this would make a great graduate project."
I haven't looked at the details for the DARPA RFI (PDF), but I'm guessing that by this point, a lot of the grad work has been done (thesis refs, anyone?) and that for this first 1 year contract, they're looking for input on the economics of scaling up the grad work. For those seriously interested, I'd bet the 100 Year Starship Public Symposium this September in Orlando would be an excellent next step. Unfortunately, it's too late to submit papers, or respond to the RFI.
Luke, help me take this mask off
A more realistic and achievable project would be terraforming Mars: eg: developing bacteria that can live and Mars and transform it's atmosphere into something better for us (as happened on Earth billions of years ago).
What, you thought they would actually do something useful for the money, beyond breathless descriptions and snazzy computer graphics?
The previous post has it right. Some areas of research, like, say, microprocessor design, are getting plenty of money. For interstellar travel, the question is what areas are *not* getting enough, or even any, funding? Figuring out where the holes are you can do for 500K. Filling the holes, obviously, will take more, but you can at least get started on them at a low level.
Some basic questions include:
(1) In 100 years, would we be sending humans? or an AI?
(2) Since technology keeps improving (we hope), how short does the trip need to be so that ship A built in 2100 is not passed by ship B built in 2120 which can travel faster?
(3) Do you plan for "a mission" (one of a kind thing), or general diffusion of society to the planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, then other stars (many shorter trips in all directions)
(4) Where are we going? a Centauri, because it's closest? The nearest star with a bunch of planets? Do we even need planets? If we have learned to live all over the Solar System, including the Asteroid Belt, maybe we just need a star and some rocks to use.
That stargate has to be around here somewhere.
Really? Assuming we actually can't go that close to the speed of light, much less faster, shouldn't we be looking at uploading our consciousnesses to quantum dots first so the payload is manageable?
Clearly the brass at DARPA have not seen a single episode of Star Trek. The show portrays the type of military/civilian heirarchy such an endeavor would require organizationally as well as the design of a spacecraft that can achieve interstellar travel. There is an abundance of technical data regarding the craft known as Enterprise, and although the science behind how it synergizes is similar to a strainer; Inventing technology that won't exist for 100+years and describing all its inner workings is quite impossible.
Star Trek also explores the sociological aspects of interstellar travel, mainly crew relations during routine and abnormal circumstances. Some of the insights given into the human psyche are profound, let alone the fact that the possibility of alien intelligent life exists and what terran-alien interaction would actually involve. And as far as ethics, I think the portrayal of a peaceful exploratory civilization is more than fitting, any civilization capable of reaching the level of technology required to travel the stars and ultimately interact with alien races should be modest enough to know that diplomacy and sound judgement are the only plausible code of behavior.
It's a shame Mr. Roddenburry is not around to collect his half million in funding grants and continue "researching"'
is to extend individual lifetime or mental capacity exponentially (or both). We are running dry of the lifetime of our best minds before more complex subjects can be grasped well enough to make progress. If you can extend the productive age even only to 100-150 years, it would allow multidisciplinary research depth unseen at the moment. All else is secondary... (and direct result of extended individual productive lifetime). I always wonder why most humans quietly cope with aging, truly disturbing cognitive dissonance.
Every time an interstellar space travel article appears on slashdot it seems like everyone forgets the basics.
1. FTL is not necessary at all. A generation ship or unmanned vessel that can reach .1c or higher is quite practical for exploring many of the more interesting local star systems. Without FTL we won't be exploring Andromeda any time soon, but for local Milky Way systems it's not a problem or any kind of excuse for not exploring. We have some very interesting systems close by.
2. Spacecraft capable of 0.1c were buildable even half a century ago. They are certainly buildable now. They are just very expensive.
3. We now actually have somewhere interesting to go: the Gliese system. At only 20 light years away it would take no more than a couple of centuries to reach with current tech.
The first step toward an interstellar mission, either manned or unmanned (its systems would have to be hugely redundant if unmanned) would be to start a permanent manufacturing facility on the mooon and maybe at Lagrange points L1 or L2
The lunar facility would be responsible for mining, smelting, casting, and machining spacecraft parts from whatever ore can be extracted from the lunar surface. Scouting for lunar locations with useful ores like aluminum, magnesium, iron, silicon, other semiconductor elements, and uranium would be a first step.
The individual parts could then be ferried to a Lagrange point facility for final assembly of the spacecraft.
Setting up off world manufacturing itself might take us a century to get up and running, but it is a necessary first step to any sort of interstellar mission. Until/unless we can invent some kind of space/warp drive or cheap antimatter manufacturing we are stuck with fusion and that means off world manufacturing facilities.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Starships won't happen. By the time we become technologically advanced enough to build an honest to goodness starship we will have developed the means of compressing human consciousness into a streams of laser light. Instead of sending starships out into space, we send Von Neumann probes that will build space stations for receiving the interstellar equivalent of a broadband connection. Think of it also as the equivalent of the data in your hard disk to the cloud. Then all we need at the far end is to build the android or bioroid that will house the "brain" data.
Just to list them:
- Light Speed (workaround highly advisable)
- Protection (unless you want those poor astronauts to die from radiation)
- cargo space (food, fuel and spare parts)
- atmosphere (you need a supply large enough to reach the other star and possibly for the journey back)
- how to get that thing into space (it'll probably be large)
Now, seeing light speed is a universal constant, you can't simply go faster then light. So either you need a lot of fuel and a lot of time (generation ship, which are huuuuge) or you need to find a workaround. With the workaround you'll probably need a LOT of energy and where are you going to get that?
Traveling to other stellar systems will be amazing. Mankind's future is in space, seeking out new resources to sustain Earth's ever growing population. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSkxPghXTCg
There is no "dark side of the moon". A side of the moon always faces the earth, but it doesn't always face the sun.