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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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Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner's $100 Million Interstellar Spacecraft Plan
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TAPPING? You POLITICIANS! Don't you realize that the END of the "Wash
Cycle" is a TREASURED MOMENT for most people?!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2016, @03:57AM
The spacecraft may be just a red herring. The real purpose of the project may be the construction of powerful lasers which could be used to announce our presence to extraterrestrials [soylentnews.org]. Much as the Apollo program popularised Tang [foodtimeline.org], such lasers could have more mundane applications such as diverting asteroids, cleaning up orbiting debris, disabling ICBMs, starting nuclear fusion, large-format engraving, and so on.