Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The quest to send a physical probe to the nearest stars is heating up – renowned Physicist Stephen Hawking has teamed up with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, to launch a laser propelled space probe at 20% of the speed of light, on a 20 year mission to physically visit the nearest stars.
According to The Guardian;
Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner launch $100m star voyage
Project to aim for sending a featherweight robotic spacecraft to the nearest star at one-fifth of the speed of light.
In an unprecedented boost for interstellar travel, the Silicon Valley philanthropist Yuri Milner and the world’s most famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking have announced $100m (£70m) for research into a 20-year voyage to the nearest stars, at one fifth of the speed of light.
Breakthrough Starshot – the third Breakthrough initiative in the past four years – will test the knowhow and technologies necessary to send a featherweight robot spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system, at a distance of 4.37 light years: that is, 40,000,000,000,000 kilometres or 25 trillion miles.
A 100 billion-watt laser-powered light beam would accelerate a “nanocraft” – something weighing little more than a sheet of paper and driven by a sail not much bigger than a child’s kite, fashioned from fabric only a few hundred atoms in thickness – to the three nearest stars at 60,000km a second.
Milner, a Russian-born billionaire investor who began as a physicist, was one of the founders of the Breakthrough prizes, the biggest in science, announced in 2012 and awarded for fundamental research in physics, life sciences and mathematics. Last year, he and Professor Stephen Hawking of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge announced another $100m Breakthrough Listen initiative to step up the search for extraterrestrial life beyond the solar system. The project has just released its first data from stars within 16 light years of Earth. The entrepreneur describes science as his “hobby.”
WUWT recently suggested that NASA should be spending money on deep space missions, including a laser propelled interstellar probe, instead of squandering their budget, replicating climate work already being performed by other government agencies.
Thankfully it now looks like wealthy private individuals have picked up the ball which NASA dropped. The first mission to the nearest star will bear the Russian flag – but at least that mission now looks likely to happen.
..I thought weapons were illegal in space ??
Nah. Only “weapons of mass destruction,” which is a euphemism for nuclear weapons. And even then, it does not prohibit the passage of ICBM re-entry vehicles carrying nuclear devices.
Actually, space is a great place for nuclear weapons, since there is zero probability that anyone would be injured by their use (excepting perhaps a space station crew flying too close to the war zone). Well, at least directly. Some problems with consequences of electromagnetic pulse, I will admit. And excitation of the Van Allen belt. War is hell, but space war is death on cell phones. (Should I have tripped a “sarc” flag?)
These space stories on WUWT reveals a philosophical issue with Anthony Watts’ approach to this site …
The worldview which we are being introduced to here is that only climate science is controversial. Anthony had a fantastic opportunity here to convey crucial lessons which span numerous speculative scientific disciplines, which are simply on good display in the climate sciences.
What he has opted to do instead is to place faith in all disciplines he is not personally familiar with.
This leaves completely open the real need:
A site which educates the public on ALL of the scientific controversies.
Apparently, this work is now left to somebody else and I guess some other site.
paradigmsareconstructed April 13, 2016 at 12:29 pm
Actually Anthony has put up an interesting article. People have commented, asked questions and are probably going to be doing some reading on the subject. What is your problem with that?
michael
Well, that made absolutely no sense ! I would say the opposite is true ..
You must be a newby on WUWT. This site puts up all manner of scientific developments. He doesn’t spoonfeed his readers like you are apparently used to. Try reading many of these threads throughout. Even Stephen Hawking and his Russian collaborator could benefit from the many astute, knowledgeable comments here.
Well Anthony hasn’t ruled out much of anything from discussion. contrails, bigfoot; must be something else Anthony banned. Must not be that important.
G
How do you get any information back from these probes? If no info it’s useless.
Some of you guys make up your own physics.
From the featured blurb;
“In an unprecedented boost for interstellar travel …”
If the (as I see it) climate con falls apart, in terms of leading to a “global government” some hyper-wealthy psychopaths can control the world through, they will attempt another con, it seems to me. I suspect an “alien invasion” con is one contingency, and that will require some way to shut up the educated folks who know damn well interstellar travel is virtually impossible.
Interstellar travel will require rockets that are orders of magnitude more powerful than thermo-nuclear fusion. Only matter annihilation can get you to the stars within a human life
https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/bussard-revisited/
The basic physics is pretty straightforward. The engineering will take some doing, but that work was STARTED in the 1950’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29
OT…has anyone seen the current heart shaped sunspot…http://spaceweather.com/
The sensible thing to do with a very large pile of money if the goal is to learn about other nearby star systems or anything else astronomical is to build a big-a** robotic observatory on the lunar far side.
Better to put it at one of the stable Lagrangian nodes where it can float freely. You want your telescope to have a (selectable) line of sight that is stable and fixed relative to the star field. If you are on the Moon, you will rotate 360 degrees in 30 days. (360 degrees/30 days =12 degrees/day = 0.5 degree/hour = 0.5 arcminute/minute = 0.5 arcsecond/second) Pesky to have your target drift out of the telescope field of view.