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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: 2) by butthurt on Thursday April 14 2016, @12:44AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday April 14 2016, @12:44AM (#331375) Journal

    The relativistic speed of this thing would militate against that. If it were to strike a planet, a great deal of energy would be released as heat, enough to cook the organisms aboard.

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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday April 15 2016, @01:41AM

    by butthurt (6141) on Friday April 15 2016, @01:41AM (#331983) Journal

    Oops, I meant to reply to another comment [soylentnews.org]