It turns out that the $1.1 million "Hundred Year Starship" project is a yearlong study for a multigenerational mission which is yet to be named ... and for which humans might need to be re-engineered.
Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center, created a stir last month at a conference sponsored by the Long Now Foundation when he mentioned that the space agency was kicking in an extra $100,000 to the project, sponsored by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (You can hear him talk about it in the video referenced above.) Worden also said he was trying to get billionaires to form a starship fund.
I wouldn't put any money on that one to two century figure. My intuitive feeling is that it may be sooner than that. Consider the impressive advances being made in the emerging field of metamaterials. These accelerating advances being made in materials science, dovetail with those being made in theoretical physics, and may actually wind up facilitating a deeper understanding of the fundamental physics of gravity, and its manipulation. And at that point, all bets are off, as far as interstellar travel issues are concerned. But that's the subject of another upcoming article. For more, click here.