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Good Luck Tiny Spaceships! - Blog Posts
World famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced Tuesday their newest attempt to find extraterrestrial life: a project called Breakthrough Starshot.
“Today we commit to the next great leap in the cosmos,” Hawking told reporters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. “Because we are human and our nature is to fly.”
Hawking said the goal of Breakthrough Starshot was to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to us, within a generation by using thousands of tiny spaceships.
Astronomers believe an Earth-like planet could exist within the “habitable zones” of Alpha Centauri, located 25 trillion miles away. It is therefore the most likely place to find life or even, as Hawking said, a possible new home for future humans.
Breakthrough Starshot’s spacecrafts, which they call “nanocrafts,” will be a gram-scale computer chip that will include “cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, navigation and communication equipment,” Avi Loeb, a Harvard scientist involved in the operation told reporters.
A rocket would deliver a “mother ship” carrying a thousand or so of the nanocrafts into space. Once in orbit, the crafts would be propelled with thin sails and hyper-powerful laser beams shot from Earth into the universe to explore and discover. There the crafts would take pictures of their surroundings, which would take around four years to be sent back to earth.
The nanocrafts would travel at around 20% of the speed of light, Loeb said. At that rate it would be possible to reach Alpha Centauri in around 20 years, and the potentially habitable planets within 70. Using the best currently existing technology, it would take some 78,000 years.
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