WTF? Zuckerberg & Hawking To Send “Nanocraft” To Alpha Centauri

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TO ALPHA CENTAURI…. AND BEYOND!

• The project, dubbed Breakthrough Starshot, will rely on tiny ‘nanocraft’
• These will fly on sails pushed by beams of light through the universe
• Each of these tiny craft is expected to carry cameras and a built in GPS 
• Mission could reach Alpha Centauri within about 20 years of its launch 

Russian businessman Yury Milner joined forces with Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg to launch the Breakthrough Starshot project, aiming to send a robot to Alpha Centauri in the next 20 years.

This comes at a time when Milner & Hawking are already working together on a $100m project centred around the search for alien life.

Have they made contact with something up on Alpha Centauri already? Or is Zuckerberg just desperate for even more users to sign up to his FaceBorg?

In yet another longshot space exploration effort, Yuri Milner is backing the Breakthrough Starshot Project with $100 million to send a “light beam to propel gram-scale ‘nano craft’” that is aiming to reach Alpha Centauri within 20 years of launch.

Milner, the well-known Internet investor, is being joined by science star Stephen Hawking and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the effort. Both will be on the board with Milner.

The research and engineering programming would send images of possible planets and other scientific data from space. Former NASA AMES Research Center Pete Worden is leading the effort.

The Alpha Centauri star system is 25 trillion miles or 4.37 light years away. That’s obviously very far, which makes sending people there hard and would take 30,000 years, said Milner in an interview. Thus, tiny rockets!

The solution, he said, was “gram-scale nanocraft, on a sail pushed by a light beam” that can fly over a thousand times faster.

“It is Silicon Valley approach to space travel,” said Milner, who said the price of launches could be just a few hundred thousand dollars compared to the astronomical prices of today.

It’s yet another of Milner’s recent moonshot efforts. A year ago, he announced a related $100 million effort to discover whether intelligent life exists in the cosmos, along with Hawking.

Named after Milner’s series of science prizes, that 10-year project will use open data and software, along with two powerful telescopes, to scan the sky in hopes of receiving signals from others who might be out there.

Starshot is the sending probes part of the equation. And there are really cool-sounding technologies like Lightsail (teeny sails), StarChip (a powerful gram-scale wafer) and Light Beamer (lasers!).

Silicon Valley’s interest in space has gained traction over the years, with a myriad of investments in all kinds of satellites and rocket technology. The most famous effort has been from Elon Musk, whose SpaceX is trying to privatize space and he recently launched and landed a spacecraft back on earth. Musk himself has said he hopes to someday colonize Mars.

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This cat Milner obviously has lots of cash to throw around with his total investment upto $200 million as he reaches for the stars.

NANOCRAFTS

So what would the point be in sending “nanocrafts” out into space?

Well the cost for one, but also we need to look at actual space travel and the times involved not to mention the stresses put on the human body, in its current form. I say that latter part due to the presentation by Dr Craig Venter to NASA in which he discusses tweeking the human genome and giving astronauts the ability to reconstruct DNA that would be damaged by the radiation exerted upon them during long journeys.

The technology incorporated into the design of these nanocrafts is the uber cool! They are going to use solar sails that will be driven by pulses from a laser. This will over time start to build up speed up near-light speed.

NASA and other space agencies and companies have long looked at solar sails as a viable means of space propulsion and cuts down on the weight and costs involved with other power sources.

BUT WHY?

So, if you have more than the standard three brain cells that seem to make up the population of the planet today, you will by now be asking…. why? just why are these cats “wasting” time and money on something like this?

Its an understandable query, and one i too share. For the answers though, we will be going into the realms of speculation based on facts we do know, and I for one cannot tell you definitively why they are doing this, but I am willing to throw some points out there to get the discussion started…

We must too look at it from the Transhumanists point of view, and the best character to go for that would be Ray Kurzweil. He is one of the people, but not alone, taking about digitising his consciousness for upload to a computer, bringing withit immortality of sorts!

What if the elites have found another civilization on Alpha Centauri or anywhere else in deep space? Could it be they will escape from our reality digitally, to a biological avatar waiting to accept their “consciousness” at the other end?

Not to worry, im just a conspiracy theorist right?

Its not like the ELites would just up and leave us right? Digitally or otherwise? Right?

Yeah, dont hold your breath waiting for that ticket out of here when it all goes horribly wrong!

Its not like there are whistleblowers out there that claim to be a part of, or have knowledge of a secret space program that has already seen a transfer of this planets wealth to the tune of trillions of $$$ going who only knows where, right?

Just saying!

The post Billionaires & Scientist To Send “Nanocraft” To Alpha Centauri At Near-Light Speed! appeared first on Kev Baker Show.

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