Could Stephen Hawking Really Use Lasers to Get to Alpha Centauri?

When he’s not busy playing Quantum Chess with Paul Rudd, famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking is busy planning an interstellar adventure. At a news conference, Tuesday, Hawking, along with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, announced a new initiative to visit Alpha Centauri, the second-closest star to Earth, within our lifetimes. It sounds bold and exciting, but is it really possible?

“Breakthrough Starshot” is the latest venture of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, a Silicon Valley-funded group known for its monumental financial awards. The plan is to use an initial $100 million to engineer a proof-of-concept fleet of “nanocraft”: ultralight, iPhone-sized spacecraft that could move through space under sail power, pushed along by the force of light particles.

The hypothetical spacecraft (currently dubbed “StarChip”) will be built out of a “gram-scale” silicon wafer, complete with onboard camera, photon thrusters, power supply, and a navigation and communication system.

Remember, the faster and further you go, the longer it takes for electromagnetic messages to reach their respective targets. So, once the target is reached, it will take 4.37 years for the first close up photos taken of the system to reach Earth, and 4.37 more years for any additional instructions from Earth to be received by the probe, provided it goes into orbit around Alpha Centauri and doesn't keep on sailing past Alpha Centauri. Obviously, the probes would have to incorporate some kind of AI in order to autonomously perform according to plans and compensate for the long delay times between sender and receiver. Long missions of these kinds will also require stable generational funding, along with a lot of patience. And who knows, given the ever increasing pace of scientific and technological advancement, by the time the probes reached their intended targets, they may have been beaten there by something far faster and more advanced. ;-) To read more, click here.