Posted on 06/21/2018 10:43:19 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The term “moonshot” is sometimes invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the first human on the Moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative transcends the moonshot descriptor because its purpose goes far beyond the Moon. The aptly-named project seeks to travel to the nearest stars.
The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a press conference joined by renowned physicists including Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the current vision is that thousands of wafer-sized chips attached to large, silver lightsails will be placed into Earth orbit and accelerated by the pressure of an intense Earth-based laser hitting the lightsail.
After just two minutes of being driven by the laser, the spacecraft will be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light—a thousand times faster than any macroscopic object has ever achieved.
Each craft will coast for 20 years and collect scientific data about interstellar space. Upon reaching the planets near the Alpha Centauri star system, an the onboard digital camera will take high-resolution pictures and send these back to Earth, providing the first glimpse of our closest planetary neighbors. In addition to scientific knowledge, we may learn whether these planets are suitable for human colonization.
The team behind Breakthrough Starshot is as impressive as the technology. The board of directors includes Milner, Hawking, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The executive director is S. Pete Worden, former director of NASA Ames Research Center. A number of prominent scientists, including Nobel and Breakthrough Laureates, are serving as advisors to the project, and Milner has promised $100 million of his own funds to begin work....
(Excerpt) Read more at singularityhub.com ...
(um, ... maybe)
One part of me says that interstellar travel will never be possible. The distances are just too huge. Another part is less realistic but more optimistic. Having lived through the computer revolution and witnessed how fast a technology can advance given a profit incentive (I thought my 16 megahertz computer was state of the art until about 3 months later when it was suddenly 1/3 the speed of contemporary ones), I wonder if the same thing can happen with space travel.
Space Truckin’
https://youtu.be/hHOrpFeXUao
I think Elon Musk is already on another planet.
After just two minutes of being driven by the laser, the spacecraft will be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light—a thousand times faster than any macroscopic object has ever achieved.
Just plug in the numbers for those understand weight, velocity and energy.
This is total crap science not worthy of discussion.
A few years after they launch Starshot, when Moore’s Law has halved the cost, doubled the speed, and quadrupled the camera resolution, they’ll launch Starshot II, which will then beat its predecessor to Alpha Centauri by ten years.
Darth Vader: I find your lack of faith disturbing, Commander.
“the spacecraft will be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light”.
Stopping may become an issue.
Contemporary interstellar travel is impossible. Any information gathered by telemetry will be for future generations... Who won’t give a shite.
Throw a rope around a comet.
A day will come when some whiz kid cracks the code that enables faster than light travel, and relegates Einstein to the dark ages of physics.
May not happen in our lifetimes, but it’s coming.
You are right my friend. To travel to the nearest star in any real sense you would have to accelerate continuously until the halfway point, then decel at exactly the same rate in order to avoid speeding past your intended target. Can a human handle 8g continuous acceleration and deceleration? It’s a joke to think that any carbon-based being will someday be born on a sol-system planet and then take a trip to a star. People simply don’t comprehend the distance or physics involved. I blame Star Wars.
And by the way. If we are ever visited by aliens, they will be robots.
Physics wishing. Imagine a new color while you’re at it.
If star travel was possible (it’s not), and if there were other sentient beings in the galaxy (there aren’t), they would have arrived, be arriving, and left calling cards everywhere in the form of self-perpetuating robots. The proof that there is no life anywhere else in the universe? Many would have by now had millions of years headstart to be here, and they aren’t here...
“Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, kid.”
Even if you could go 1% the speed of light that is still 1,860 miles per second or 6,696,000 miles per hour. If you could bleed 25 miles per hour off of that every second it would take 3 days to come to a complete stop. If you have ever had to slam on the brakes you know that quick of a stop does not feel to good.
They’ll have to accelerate the craft at somewhere around 50,000g for 2 minutes which sounds like a lot, but if you rewrite it as 50kg that’s only about 110 lbs and that’s certainly doable. I always wanted to be a rocket scientist!
And to think I used to be impressed with my friends 1969 Camaro Z28 acceleration. That beast could pin you back in your seat. It only felt like we were doing 0.2C.
0.2C in 120 seconds. Sure. “Earth, can I borrow all of your power generation capacity for the next two minutes. Please?”
To add, at that speed a 1 gram object would have the energy of 100 tons of TNT, or 10 tens the energy of a Airbus 380 at cruising speed. So a space craft that strikes a pebble going 0.01c is going to have a very bad day.
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