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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.
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!
No. Not being able to leverage quantum entanglement into actual FTL communications is a fundamental limit of how it works.
To state it simply. If two particles have their state entangled for a property then measuring that property on one causes the same measured property on the other to have the opposite value but which way around these are is essentially random and impossible to control. The best you can use this for is to securely duplicate a sequence of random values, (and in the case of sending one half of each pair to another site, assuming your implementation doesn't have any problems, know if someone had at all intercepted those particles).
This is why all current uses of the technology are used to send an encryption key which you then use to encrypt normal communications.
Notice that it says they are starting a $100 million research program. I would assume the purpose of this research would be to answer those questions and figure out if its really possible to do this.
Perhaps we will get bigger population. However, history shows, that once electricity, television and contraceptives are introduced, population growth slows down significantly. Once population becomes richer population growth turns negative.