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Hawking Backs $100 Million Interstellar Travel Project to Send 'Nano-Craft' To Nearest Star
At a press conference on Tuesday, Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, cosmologist Stephen Hawking and a group of scientists and philanthropists announced a $100 million research program to send robotic probes to nearby stars within a generation. The group believes that using a nano-spacecraft propelled by lasers, they will be able to reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years after launch. The nearest star system is 40 trillion km away, which using current technology would take about 30,000 years to reach there. The aforementioned group said that thanks to their research and development, they might be able to make a spacecraft that could cut down the duration to 30 years. Reuters reports: Tuesday's announcement, made with cosmologist Stephen Hawking, comes less than a year after the announcement of Breakthrough Listen. That decade-long, $100 million project, also backed by Milner, monitors radio signals for signs of intelligent life across the universe. Breakthrough Starshot involves deploying small light-propelled vehicles to carry equipment like cameras and communication equipment. Scientists hope the vehicles, known as nano-craft, will eventually fly at 20 percent of the speed of light, more than a thousand times faster than today's spacecraft. "The thing would look like the chip from your cell phone with this very thin gauzy light sail," said Pete Worden, the former director of NASA's Ames Research Center, who is leading the project. "It would be something like 10, 12 feet across."The Atlantic has just published an in-depth report on this, also explaining how this project came to being. You can also watch the live stream of the press conference.
I love the idea. However with a device that small, how do we get a signal back? It will not be able to generate a strong radio or light signal to send back. Would we be able to use existing radio telescopes to pick it up, or would we need better receiving infrastructure?
Silence is a state of mime.
Is there room for enough antimatter to take the star out?
So why hasn't "someone" done this already?
Let's hope they can keep the lights on...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Say it makes it to Alpha Centauri, and lets say there is intelligent life there... At 1/5 the speed of light, this thing is a micro weapon. Wouldn't it be perceived as being shot at by Earth?
Better make two of those...
...in case the first one hits a dust spec at 134 million miles per hour.
>> fly at 20 percent of the speed of light
Quit whining. This isn't in our stupid orbit, this is interstellar. We're way below a rounding error there- if we did nothing but shoot little spacecraft out, we wouldn't even be detectable, much less annoy someone.
Um, small or not, have they considered how the craft is going to be shielded against collisions at that speed? Even something as small as a grain of sand at 0.2C packs quite a wallop. Also, is radiation an issue at that velocity?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Something like this was proposed many years ago by Robert L Forward, called Starwisp. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for details.
The probe would be very light but extended, like a cobweb. Tiny processor/sensor nodes would exist where the wires touched. Some nodes and web filaments would undoubtedly be destroyed by dust collisions en route, but would be multiply redundant. On arrival, the probe would be tattered and torn but still functional.
Sean Ellis
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He introduced thermodynamics to the theory of black holes. He found the mechanism of Hawking Radiation and the evaporation of black holes, hugely important in understanding the fate of the universe and why there seem to be no sub-stellar black holes. Pretty good for a guy who can't hold a pen. He does seem to enjoy celebrity. If they could only fix that under-bite.
I'm all for science, I work in a lab after all, but the technological tasks facing them won't be solved anytime soon.
Maybe 20 years from now, but not anytime soon.
Call me when they have a working, fully functional one.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
At $100 million, that's roughly the cost of 40 airstrikes against ISIS. It's too bad we're such a trigger-happy country, we aren't willing to let our thumbs rest for two weeks and use the money we saved to launch a scientific mission instead.
What a waste. What about MOON based lasers?
I think it would be a good idea to send millions of these, with information how to find earth on them :) better yet if they are self replicating :D
Sadly, I think Hawking is getting senile.
Build a LASER on the moon? Only if they call it "The Alan Parsons Project"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The nearest star is btw..... The Sun.
Being in a wheelchair and overcoming adversity isn't exactly unique to him; lots of others do it on a daily basis, too.
But not with his swagger and cool robot voice.
For decades, the tiny ships will tore across the empty wastes of space to finally dive on to the first planet they come across, where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire space fleet will be accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
"rigamortis "
WTF? If you're going to be an ass, at least get it right: "rigor mortis". You'll look a bit less like a jackass next time.
Obstacles are way too high. Current calculation requires 60 Giga Watt laser beam. Largest nuclear plant in USA, Palo Verde, Arizona, has approx 1.25 Giga Watt power.
More: according to the plan, installations that generate power of 50 nuclear plants would need to be sent to space, for lasers are supposed to be above the atmosphere.
Finally, the power of 50 nuclear plants would be concentrated into the area more or less equal to handkerchief. I think that handkerchief will evaporate, maybe it will not. However there might be some interference at the interstellar probe. Technical difficulties are insurmountable so far.
Anyway, the last time I have checked approximately 50% of world's population did not have proper sewer, and approximately 15% do not have running water and electricity. Just a small fraction of interstellar travel project would bring these necessities to the fellow human beings. I would say, that we should build few nuclear power plants here on earth first.
I think that we will need 100 years to send a interstellar probe.
A visible light laser can't practically be focused to meter scales over more than about ~10^7M considering diffraction and reasonable (eg 10s of M) sized mirrors. At 0.1C, that gives you an acceleration time of ~1 second. So the sail material is hit by ~10% of its mass energy in 1 second. No way it could possibly survive, even if the laser could be constructed.
Considering that a 30M telescope is a ~$1B project, requiring a much larger telescope is not consistent with a $100M project.
This is why we need experimental physicists as well as theorists.....
It's like no one has read the book "The Forge of God" by Greg Bear.
Best to keep quiet until we have overwhelming tactical and strategic supremacy over other planets.
If it really is a privately-funded undertaking, a link to gofundme or some such would be useful.
But if this is one of those "Ah, if only the evil RethugliKKKans allowed NASA to fund it" things, then no way no how.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
By the time the probe is ten years into its mission (half way), it will be passed by a new probe that can do the whole trip in ten years.
Do not look into beam with remaining eye!
We're going to need something like this to get a good look at Planet IX once we find it.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
That assumes continuous power. Because power is energy divided by time, P=E/t, you can charge up capacitors to a million joules (E=1/2CV^2) and release it all in a microsecond to make a terawatt of power (10^6/10^-6 = 1=^12). It's common (n the field).
Perhaps this is a dumb question. If the probe can attain speeds of 0.2C, just how do they plan on slowing it down once you arrive? Seems like a lot of effort to spend for a visit that is likely to last at most a day or two.
Considering how difficult interstellar travel is, I think Earth should wait at least 100 years before trying such a thing.
How much has Hawking himself forked towards those $100 mil? Just don't come after my wallet for pet projects!
ie - quantumly entangled photons/electrons held in static fields used to transmit data / energy will be used to power and communicate with the nano-sats.
They just can't announce the breakthroughs making this possible as the CIA/NSA would have collective apoplexy if the world at large knew they could have secure instantaneous communications that were immune to their efforts.
Yes but what if..?
Can't anyone figure out how to use Quantum Entanglement to communicate directly to the spacecraft?
Just load it with a couple TB of unused quantum pairs and send it to its destination and receive beautiful pictures immediately without that stupid limitation of "light speed".
I mean, how hard can it be?
...one of the microcraft cruising through the Solar system originating from other worlds. They could be all around us before we'd notice.
Once it's zooming along at .2c, it won't have much time to observe anything. Unless the plan includes deceleration, which adds quite a bit of time to the trip. Also, we'll need to be prepared for the severely red-shifted signal coming home from it. If it's not going to tell us what it found, we might as well just throw rocks, which would probably make ET mad.
Why did Hawking decide it's OK to send tracer bullets to Alpha Centauri so A-C's ETs can locate us? Because they can already observe our electronic emissions anyhow?
He also wrote some books for laypeople, including the bestseller "A Brief History of Time", which was well-known for explaining a lot of modern physics theory in a way that regular people can understand.
Could we keep it there once it arrived? Or would it just whiz right through the star system at 20-percent the speed of light?
I love the idea. However with a device that small, how do we get a signal back? It will not be able to generate a strong radio or light signal to send back. Would we be able to use existing radio telescopes to pick it up, or would we need better receiving infrastructure?
The real questing isn't detecting the radio/light signal. The real question is how in the world (or more aptly "universe") can such a craft survive impact with dust when moving at the velocity that they are proposing? A stationary piece of dust weighting 1 gram will have an impact force of 662,920,828 TONS! A piece of dust moving in the opposite direction of the probe will have even higher impact energy due to the relative speeds between the two objects.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
A stationary piece of dust weighting 1 gram will have an impact force of 662,920,828 TONS! A piece of dust moving in the opposite direction of the probe will have even higher impact energy due to the relative speeds between the two objects.
To put that in perspective, imagine an indestructible needle/pin and put 1816 Empire State Buildings on top of that indestructible pin and then put your spacecraft under that pin...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Maybe the laser propulsion system would automatically clean the dust out of the way. Dust shouldn't take much to give it a shove, or possibly to evaporate it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I guess no one is considering that any spacecraft attempting to go to Alpha Centauri later in time could run into these toy probes and cause the (later sent) spacecraft to be critically damaged or destroyed. Anyone who has studied this topic knows given the incredible speeds involved, even a small object can cause horrendous damage when they collide.
But you know, screw that - rich dumb guys are giving away 100 million dollars baby! Gotta' get some!
Considering First Contact will happen by ~2024, the whole mission seems like a moot point.
To put that in perspective, imagine an indestructible needle/pin and put 1816 Empire State Buildings on top of that indestructible pin and then put your spacecraft under that pin...
But how far are you dropping it from?
Nope, no sig
A stationary piece of dust weighing 1 gram is not dust, that's a pebble. What happens to the poor planet it impacts at those speeds.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Obstacles are way too high. Current calculation requires 60 Giga Watt laser beam. Largest nuclear plant in USA, Palo Verde, Arizona, has approx 1.25 Giga Watt power.
60GW for 2 hours, or one launch every 2 days, powered by a single power plant. It's not clear that the mission requires more frequent launches than that, so there's no basis to say "way too high" here.
More: according to the plan, installations that generate power of 50 nuclear plants would need to be sent to space, for lasers are supposed to be above the atmosphere.
Actually, according to the plan, the lasers will be sited on the Earth's surface. They will require a mile-wide adaptive optics array to compensate for atmospheric distortion. Perhaps you aren't too familiar with the plan you're citing.
Finally, the power of 50 nuclear plants would be concentrated into the area more or less equal to handkerchief. I think that handkerchief will evaporate, maybe it will not. However there might be some interference at the interstellar probe. Technical difficulties are insurmountable so far.
While a "handkerchief" would likely "evaporate" (become ionized, more realistically), I believe this mission actually plans to use solar sails. Solar sails are defined by having insufficient absorption to undergo catastrophic heating in the course of ordinary use. Consequently, I think the technical difficulties are a lot less technically difficult than your hyperbole would otherwise suggest.
Anyway, the last time I have checked approximately 50% of world's population did not have proper sewer, and approximately 15% do not have running water and electricity. Just a small fraction of interstellar travel project would bring these necessities to the fellow human beings. I would say, that we should build few nuclear power plants here on earth first.
If you believe that "a small fraction" of $10B would provide water, sanitation, and electrical services to every last person on Earth, you're mistaken.
I think that we will need 100 years to send a interstellar probe.
So, after all that, you think their estimate of 40 years isn't that far off?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Nope. There's a rich Russian involved in there. That's where at least some of the money is coming from.
Apparently he got bored of buying tiny giraffes.
We can start with Hawking and Zuckerberg. Hawking may not live another 20 years to survive the trip, but Zuck would. Let another star system have him!
I suspect the propulsion laser will be here in the solar system. Not on a probe the size of a cellphone. Because shining a light on your own sail is like standing on a sailboat blowing into its sails. You're not exerting leverage on the craft. Only on yourself. Also because a laser needs a power source, assuming you could get around the prior physics issue.
The big question here is, as was stated above, how will it get any information back? As an information gathering instrument for our benefit, that seems like the critical question even if everything else is quite reasonable, as it may well be, although I'm just going by the fact that Hawking is in on this. I kind of doubt he failed to do the math. :)
Now, as a probe carrying information from us, to any space-faring critters in the target system... I imagine that would be quite interesting to them, just as we would be interested if a small device came into our solar system being dragged, or having been dragged, more or less, by a light sail.
Even just as a "we sent something to another star and got it there, assuming it didn't run into something along the way" seems pretty cool to me. And considering some of the things humans have done at similar costs... a few hundreds of millions of dollars, if TFS has it right... yachts, etc... it also seems plenty worthy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Possibly, but you'd need to take the sail down on occasion to allow the beam to pass through it to clear the way ahead of it.
I'm sure that the laser could technically act on objects that are somehow stationary and in the path of the laser, but it is most likely that an object would impact the craft from an angle that is less than head-on. If so, then the object would have originated outside the path of the laser and would not be affected.
Additionally, for the laser to clear even straight ahead, the sail would have to come down, at least on occasion, to avoid blocking the laser's path. And that seems theoretically possible, but more complex and power intensive where you'd have a very limited power budget on such a craft to begin with.
I honestly don't know how they'd maintain a viable interstellar craft for that long without at least an RTG onboard, and RTGs are pretty heavy.
I hope they have a very big antenna to get the report from that "chip from your cell phone"'s bluetooth chip.
On the plus side, the smaller your spacecraft is the lower your odds of being hit are.
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Why is anyone still even listening when this guy supposedly proposes anything? He's just a vegetable in a motorized chair!
Don't you guys realize that all the speech you hear when he "talks" comes out of a SYNTHESIZER, and that for the last dozen or so years, it has actually been programmed to talk by his former students and colleagues!
HE'S not the one doing it! In fact, I'm not even 100% convinced the lump of goo in that chair is even HIM anymore. They may be "Weekend at Bernie's"-ing this!
They probably all got stoned on April 1st, and were like, "hey man... as an April Fools joke, we should like... ask for 100 million dollars to... you know... uh... um... SHOOT SHIT AT ONE FIFTH THE SPEED OF LIGHT!" But because they were high, they waited for a week to finally do it!
Once there it just crashes into the star?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Indeed! It would take a traditional probe roughly 50 years to reach the estimated distance.
Plus, communication is a much easier problem for Planet IX-like distances than for stars.
It would be interesting to test such a gizmo on Pluto even. We didn't get a decent look at one entire hemisphere because New Horizons was moving too fast relative to Pluto's 6-day rotational period. Send a nano-probe to check out the "blurry" side.
Table-ized A.I.
If I remember correctly from an article in Starlog in 1979, at .1c, interstellar hydrogen will create enough stress on a vessel made of a block of diamond to break it apart.
http://www.isciencetimes.com/a...
Let’s work it out. .5 C. So, that’s 14989622900 m / s. ;)
KE= 0.5xmv2
We can use your example of
Let’s say the package has a mass of only 2 kg. (would be more like 10 though)
Then we get KE= 0.5 x 2kg x 224688794684204410000m2/s2
= 224688794684204410000 joules.
I don’t know 2.2468879468420442e+20 J seems like a lot. Hiroshima was “only” 6.3xE+13
In case you are wondering, 10kg would take it to 5.61721986710511e+20J. Also a lot
That's just using three photons instead of two. You still can't transmit information with it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"The thing would look like the chip from your cell phone with this very thin gauzy light sail,"
Sounds like a job for Nokia!
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Since there are so many parts to this project that are on the thin line between science fiction and science fantasy I think their estimate of 20(?) years (or about one generation) of development is more than a little optimistic. That said, in TWO generations this kind of thing might be a bit more practical, especially if, by that time, we have some relatively robust nano-bots that could construct and MAINTAIN the "starwisp". (Their stated approach to getting over the very probable impact of interstellar dust at relativistic speed is just numbers; that is launch a lot and hope a few survive. Not a very solid strategy to hang a likely multi billion dollar project on).
Given that time frame (around 50 years?) another possibility arises. Their proposal currently has the 100 GW laser Beamer array being in a high altitude part of the super-dry atacama desert in Chile. Despite it's deliberate isolation from major population centers, it could still be used as an insanely powerful anti-sat weapon which would essentially give the controlling nation the power (ha ha) to rule near earth space. (Current technology shows 100KW lasers blowing drones out of the sky, this would be a million times more powerful). Even though it only can "see" half the sky, almost all orbits would eventually process overhead, only get-sync satellites on the opposite side of the earth would be permanently safe. This potential destructive capability would probably be a major block for international approval of this project.
So, since the insanely ambitious other aspects of this project are unlikely to be ready soon, why not plan for a time when (hopefully) launch costs have given us ready access to the moon? In fifty years, it probably won't be insanely expensive to build this array on the Far side of the moon and it brings several advantages. No atmospheric distortion, geologic stability, slow (two week pointing time) rotation and abundant solar power just adds to the principal advantage of being unable to be used against the earth (and near earth objects possibly out to the moon's orbit). Another major advantage is that with the improved stability and beam purity it may be possible to keep it "locked on" for farther than 1 million kilometers. If it could do ten times this distance then the acceleration could be reduced and, more importantly, the sail would only have to be not absorb 99.9 % of the radiation instead of 99.99%. (Or the payload could be increased by a factor of ten or, you get the picture).
For these reasons, a far side lunar array should be considered. As an aside, in addition to using this laser launch system to power space vehicles/habitats throughout the solar system; it might prove to be a very effective asteroid deflection system. A 100 GW laser beam hitting the side of an asteroid would provide a very powerful "kick" from the presumed boiling off of any material there. Over long periods of time, perhaps even the light pressure alone would be significant.
By the way, sorry for the numerous typos, improper use of contractions (it's vs. it's) etc. I'm typing this on a smartphone on a bumpy bus!
we need to develop technology to use light to construct objects in space so we can build a communications hub when we get there
This is not an interesting idea at all. I hate to say it, but this level of stupidity is beneath Dr. Hawking. Even after solving all the technological problems standing in the way, in some accelerated miracle fashion, we will have accomplished what? Sending a single piece of space junk across the galaxy with no way to receive any sort of data back from this "probe?"
I saw a brief snippet about this on the local news last night, complete with animations of the solar sail and some guy holding a 4" x 4" PCB up to the camera, like it was some sort of launch-ready kit.
My hat's off to the con men who convinced private investors to fund their cushy research project career.
Well, the laser beam is going to be a lot wider than the craft mirror when you get to any distance, and there will also be some bending around the edge of the sail. So I don't think taking down the sail will be needed.
Also, a few holes in the sail aren't going to be important. All that matters is the payload, which will be a lot smaller.
Now if they were flying into a cloud of bbs, or even something 1/1000th that weight, I'd be thinking very differently, but most interstellar dust is going to be lighter than the dust that floats in the air, and that's light enough to be shoved around by a laser.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I bet they'll have to use more than 15 digits of pi for this project.
Ignoring the acceleration issues, the laser issues, the biggest problem will be a matter of precision. They would need to calculate the future position of Alpha Centauri exactly. Next biggest problem, you need to send this probe to Alpha Centauri with a precision of less than 1 meter per second. If you are out by any more than this in a vertical or horizontal axis, you will miss the entire solar system by the time the probe gets there. 86400*365*20=630 million seconds in 20 years.
The earth is 93 million miles from the sun, the probe if it is out by 1 meter per second will end up being 630 million kilometers away from the destination star.
The probe will be moving at 0.2c since Alpha Centauri is 4-5 light years away. So it will need to travel at 0.2c so that works out to 59,958,491.6 meters per second. We need an accuracy of less than 1 meter per second to even get near that solar system. Which is 1 part in 60 million.
If our solar system is similar in size to the Centauri system this probe will pass thru the system in less than a day. Anyone want to calculate the number of pixels that a Jupiter size planet would occupy at say a distance of 100,000,000 meters. I can't imagine ever taking a clearer picture than we can already.
These probes if possible would be far better used to explore our own solar system and the surrounding heliopause.
"The nearest star system is 40 trillion km away, which using current technology would take about 30,000 years to reach there" And it takes how long for US Federal Reserve to print 40 trillion dollars?
An iphone moving at 0.3c would destroy a city..... How would these idiots feel if the alpha centaurians sent 1000 nukes back at us as a "reply"