The BBC and the Guardian both carry stories about an unmanned interstellar spacecraft designed to reach the Alpha Centauri system "within a generation" (30 or so years).
The spacecraft would be miniaturised to the size of an average silicon chip, and be propelled by a solar sail which would receive a boost from a powerful laser on the Earth.
Milner's Breakthrough Foundation is running a project, backed by Hawking, to research the technologies needed for such a mission, which they think will soon be feasible.
takyon: The campaign is called Breakthrough Starshot. Breakthrough Initiatives also announced the release of initial observational datasets from the Breakthrough Listen 10-year SETI effort.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Wednesday April 13 2016, @04:03AM
Ok, so we successfully get it up to 20%C and it zips out of our solar system in a few hours
If we can pull that off, without anything else, that is a huge discovery. If the probe can send back any telemetry at all, imagine how much we could learn.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 13 2016, @05:03AM
The single solution I can see: chips created with Josephson junctions [wikipedia.org].
To put it mildly, not very common in the current technology, I doubt anyone tried the Moore law on them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford