Slashdot Mirror
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.
You can't collimate a laser beam that perfectly. When I looked into that some time recently I believe for a visible red light laser you'd see significant dispersion after less than 10km. Yes, in a vacuum. Even if you could align the internals perfectly you'd still get a small amount of diffraction where the beam leaves the apparatus.
Over lightyears you're never going to maintain beam cohesion.
This also both answers the GP's question for the period of time the such a probe is being accelerated and why it wouldn't be accelerated the whole distance. Indeed given the travel time, even if accelerated to very close to the speed of light, you'd not be aiming the laser at the destination system (it would move some by the time the probe got there).
You jest, but a job with an expected four-year delay between rudimentary commands sounds *perfect* for Windows 10.
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.
If you have a continuous stream of launches, it would be simple to create a mesh network (for redundancy) that daisy-chains the length of the path to relay signals.
And by having a large cluster of detector devices you can have an arbitrarily large collective system for high resolution.
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."