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Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner's $100 Million Interstellar Spacecraft Plan

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday April 13 2016, @02:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-a-tiny-spaceship dept.

turgid writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @12:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @12:58PM (#331120)

    At this stage, you could just as well speculate about using custom-built wormholes for communication.

    I'd call it the Early Bird Protocol, and implement it as RFC 2549. [ietf.org]