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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'm aware of no human technology which would enable us to say with any certainty at all that there aren't 10,000,000 similar-sized alien probes in our solar system right now.
Why would you? The whole idea of a laser is that it stays cohesive. It isn't like you'd see the beam like using a laser in atmosphere.
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.
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.
Half an hour is a really long time. After a few seconds at 0.1 c, it would already be a huge challenge to keep a laser beam focused on a 10 meter target.
I mean, how hard can it be?
It can be, and is, impossible.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No, but launching a probe that has no way of communicating back to earth is a monumental waste of resources.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.