Breakthrough Starshot

[cronus]

http://www.rationalia.com/forum/viewtop ... =2&t=50960

Nano-space craft to visit other star-systems. If we can do it then aliens will already have done it. We need a net to catch alien nano-spacecraft.

[Cunt]

Beat you! (but your topic title is more descriptive)

http://www.rationalia.com/forum/viewtop ... =2&t=50960

Should we ask for a merge?

[cronus]

Could do but it'd significantly reduce the number of recent threads on this part of the forum....

[Cunt]

Shitlord!

[pErvinalia]

Just saw a report on this on the Beeb. Looks exciting. The biggest obstacle I see would be how to transmit images/data back to Earth. I'd assume you'd need quite powerful transmission capabilities, which might require quite a bit of energy. But there's lots of sources of energy (or potential energy) in orbit around a planet/star, so perhaps there will be a novel way of harnessing that at a tiny scale to send back transmissions.

[pErvinalia]

They are talking about sending it to Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbour. Regarding potential planets there to study, the following is from New Scientist (therefore it may be total hyperbole):

There could be two Earth-like planets within cosmic spitting distance of our own. Both are likely too close to their star to host life, but the discovery opens the possibility of other planets in the system with more temperate climates.

Alpha Centauri is a binary star system just 4.3 light years away from our own. In 2012 astronomers announced that the system had a planet, which they dubbed Alpha Centauri Bb as it was apparently orbiting the smaller of the stars, Alpha Centauri B.

The team said it was a rocky world slightly more massive than Earth. But in 2013, other researchers called into question the existence of Bb, saying the evidence wasn’t good enough.

“If you ask anyone working in exoplanets, they would all have a different opinion about the existence of Alpha Centauri Bb,” says Brice-Oliver Demory of the University of Cambridge.

That’s why he and his colleagues have been using the Hubble Space Telescope to search for planet. They weren’t able to find it, but have instead seen hints of a second Earth-sized world in the system.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn ... ar-system/

[cronus]

For a fraction of the estimated cost and far sooner. They could build a big telescope on the moon and study loads of planets for this effort. Another example of space hubris in the making. Spend a hundred and fifty billion throwing wafers
into space.

[pErvinalia]

Well it will be able to be scaled up in either size and/or capability once the initial infrastructure is built and the concept tested. A telescope on the moon will only ever be a telescope on the moon. And at what cost? Putting hundreds of tonnes of high precision optical equipment on the moon is highly unlikely to give you much change out of $150 billion. I don't actually know that, or have much of a concept of what 150bill gets you. But it must be fucking expensive putting that on the moon.