So I'm sitting here watching the sun set behind the Golden Gate Bridge from the porch of the Lodge at Cavallo Point, which is the undisclosed location alluded to earlier. And now I can tell you is that the reason I came here was to participate in a vision/planning session to lay the groundwork for an international, non-governmental organization dedicated to supporting technologies to make it possible to build an interstellar starship within a hundred years.
This is the 100-Year Starship Study* you may have heard of (and heard badly reported and sensationalized by Faux**). There are no plans for the U.S. government to build a starship, and nobody--to my knowledge--is planning on crashing a space ship on Mars and marooning anybody there. What this is is an attempt to design a creditable business model to support technologies and social research in a variety of fields that would be essential to designing a ship that could take humans to the stars--everything from sustainable small biospheres to small group dynamics to photon entanglement to propulsion systems.
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"Yes, I was at that meeting.
http://twitter.com/#!/100yearstarship
An official press release from DARPA/NASA will be issued. Till then no details from me." -- Jack Sarfatti
http://www.facebook.com/pages/100-Year-Starship/182066625158495