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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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(Score: 3, Disagree) by VanderDecken on Wednesday April 13 2016, @04:07AM
How's [it] gonna send info back?
Quantum entangled transmitters/receivers? I know we're not there yet, but ...
The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 13 2016, @04:49AM
Well, buy some ansibles from LeGuin or Scott Card.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday April 13 2016, @08:15AM
No. Quantum entanglement doesn't work that way. In particular, you cannot, in any way, use quantum entanglement to transmit information when you have no way to transmit information without quantum entanglement. This is forbidden by the very fundamentals of quantum mechanics, so breaking this would mean breaking quantum mechanics itself. Or in other words, should we ever find a way to use quantum entanglement in a way you envisage, we'd not use quantum mechanics, but some post-quantum physics. At this stage, you could just as well speculate about using custom-built wormholes for communication.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @12:58PM
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]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @09:19PM
Is it possible to use QE for NON-faster-than-light communication? Even if we can't get FTL, it would be nice to not need huge antennas and power to communicate at such distances.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday April 14 2016, @12:44AM
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.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday April 15 2016, @01:41AM
Oops, I meant to reply to another comment [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 14 2016, @06:45AM
Any communication using quantum entanglement has classical communication as integral part. You can use it to do things you could not do with classical communication alone, but you cannot do communication where classical communication is not possible.
One way to think about it is that entanglement communication is inherently encrypted with a one-time pad only available to the sender, and you need classical communication in order to transmit the key. Moreover if you listen without the other side sending, you'll just get random noise, and thus you cannot even determine if the other side actually has sent anything unless you receive the key through classical communication.
Quantum entanglement is great if you want to have uncrackable encryption, but it cannot replace classical communication, only add to it.
So even with quantum entanglement you'll need the big antennas.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.