{"id":8405,"date":"2016-04-12T07:55:37","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T11:55:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8405"},"modified":"2016-04-12T13:26:42","modified_gmt":"2016-04-12T17:26:42","slug":"starshot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8405","title":{"rendered":"Starshot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know what this is about, but Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner are here in New York today, with a press conference downtown scheduled at noon, supposedly to announce a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.space.com\/32537-stephen-hawking-starshot-space-exploration.html\">mysterious new space exploration initiative<\/a>, to be called Starshot.  There&#8217;s also evidently some sort of Columbia connection, with a reception scheduled up here.   More later, when we find out what this is all about. Last year there was a Hawking\/Milner announcement of Breakthrough Listen and Breakthrough Message, projects related to communication with alien civilizations.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  Livestream will be available <a href=\"https:\/\/livestream.com\/accounts\/18650072\/events\/5143435\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  According to <a href=\"https:\/\/lenta.ru\/news\/2016\/04\/12\/starshot\/\">this source<\/a> (and Google translate&#8230;), this is a project to send a small space probe to Alpha Centauri.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  &#8220;Breakthrough Starshot&#8221; is a $100 million research program, hoping to develop (ultimate cost of order $10 billion) very small probes attached to light-sails, pushed towards Alpha Centauri by ground-based lasers (a &#8220;Silicon Valley approach to spaceflight&#8221;).  The claim is that such things could travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light, get there in 20 years or so.  One thing I&#8217;m not seeing is how you get a signal back to earth.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  They have a website <a href=\"http:\/\/breakthroughinitiatives.org\/Initiative\/3\">here<\/a>, there&#8217;s a story at the New York Times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/04\/13\/science\/alpha-centauri-breakthrough-starshot-yuri-milner-stephen-hawking.html\">here<\/a>, at Scientific American <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/100-million-plan-will-send-probes-to-the-nearest-star\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One thought about this is that if you really could accelerate probes this way with lasers, sending them out to solar system planets in days would seem to be a more interesting application.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  A more detailed story is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/science\/archive\/2016\/04\/yuri-milner-zuckerberg-starshot-interstellar-centauri\/477669\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t know what this is about, but Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner are here in New York today, with a press conference downtown scheduled at noon, supposedly to announce a mysterious new space exploration initiative, to be called Starshot. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=8405\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8405"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8414,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8405\/revisions\/8414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}