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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.
They'll probably use force fields and/or deflector shields.
They were already swallowed by a small dog
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.
You jest, but a job with an expected four-year delay between rudimentary commands sounds *perfect* for Windows 10.
Accelerator physicist - which really means engineer......
but I play Kerbal a lot so I'm an expert in space stuff ;-)
More than a few probes have mysteriously been lost.
No mystery at all. They have been hit by nanoprobes launched from Alpha Centauri and were destroyed on impact.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
You can't collimate a laser beam that perfectly. When I looked into that some time recently ...
... I remembered to be more careful with my remaining eye.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Call me when they have a working, fully functional one.
Why, so we can get another awesome opinion?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black