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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.
So why hasn't "someone" done this already?
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!
They'd be better off building and situating the launching laser in orbit, or perhaps on the Moon, or perhaps out in one of Earths' L-points, where an atmosphere won't disperse the beam.. and while I'm thinking about it, why rely entirely on a launching laser? They could use a combination of solar sails and gravity assist from Sol, then supplement that with a launching laser.
Of course building a gigantic laser in orbit around the Earth, or on the Moon, or anywhere it could possibly be pointed back at the Earths' surface, isn't going to play well with just about any nation on Earth..
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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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.
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
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.
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.....
I mean, how hard can it be?
It can be, and is, impossible.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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?
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.