Obviously, no need to answer further, I'm just being grumpy I imagine.
Man - why go there? What are we looking to learn?
Do they have the kilometer Gw phased array yet?
The meterwide/gram weight sails?
The chips that weight one gram with comms and cameras and all that?
And just to clarify, they can't flip and slow down, so it's a 0.15c flyby of alphacentauri, entirely automated. So hopefully the code does't fuck up in this alien environnement without human help.
What do they expect to learn at that speed and with such small sensors? Like a picture of the planet, like we get telescopes? I sure wonder the speed at which that's going to transmit data.
I'm just seeing "proof or concept" but this is mostly concept and no proof.
And if this is "step one" of interstellar travel, what's step two?
Edit0: Just reading the wiki this is so absurd -atmospheric turbulence is a challenge to deliver te GW laserb- so were planning on building a km phased array in space to accelerate the swarm. Just this itself is way way beyond realistic. Doesn't this breakdown at napkin math levels?
> Man - why go there? What are we looking to learn?
The how is a much bigger problem than the why. It would be great to have some closer sampling of Proxima b, such as images, spectroscopy, etc. You won't get much on a 0.15c flyby, but you'd get something, hopefully. No room for error of course, with a several year round trip for commands.
Having some sense of the planet could inform a colonization plan that's likely to have even bigger problems with the hows rather than the whys.
But the whys are clear. Even if it's not actually feasible.
Only in terms of cost; there's nothing that seems to be fundamentally unobtanium here. The question is whether it can be come cheap enough to be viable.
> there's nothing that seems to be fundamentally unobtanium here
Don't you think this is begging the question? The entire history of humanity is a lengthy series of discoveries that people of times past would have little reason to think possible, and in some cases are revolutionary enough that it would likely have been all but impossible for people of times past to even think of them.
Then there's just the boring things, like aspirin. If not for the willow tree, it would not exist today. Ancient medicine dating back 2400+ years recommended chewing on willow bark to treat fever or pain, and indeed they were right. Of course we can now easily synthesize it, but that's not always a given for every compound or 'thing' imaginable, to say the least. For an obvious example, see: uranium.
And now factor in how extremely negligible our knowledge of anything outside of our own planet is. We've been sending probes and rovers to Mars since 1962. We only discovered the soil on Mars was relatively moist (2% water by weight) in 2013! 50+ years to figure out there's water in the soil. And the latest drills can only go a couple of inches deep and are scarcely used in any case, because they tend to break. It's impossible to know what you don't know, but I see every reason to think that it's probably quite extensive.
I'm saying that the fundamental things required in order to launch gram-scale interstellar probes don't seem out of reach; that largely something close to the requirements could be made at great cost today, and making a mission practical is mostly about cost optimization and economies of scale.
I think largely whether we do it in 50 years comes down to whether we've wiped out a lot of our economic output by then with strife, and whether we still consider exploration worthwhile to spend a lot of money and reources on.
Haha, yeah I absolutely did. Reading his post and then your response it seemed to me to be a claim that there's nothing out there to discover, as opposed to there being nothing in the way of this means of exploration.
I think the gram class probes with gram class sails that are a meter wide are outside the scope of feasibility today and would require unobtanium. Shielding too.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and its code hasn’t broken.
Construct a stack of starships in orbit and you would be able to get a probe there. It’s never about the technology, it’s about whether someone cares enough to spend the resources.
What do you mean about the starship stack? That's the array?
For Voyager, I'll argue that it's mission is much simpler (doesn't need to aim forthe position of something 30 years in the future) and that we keep transmitting to it (the sheer distance will limit our involvement as the delays between transmissions grows). It's also not going at 0.15c, where it needs to do the calcs very quickly.
I'm not sure how easy it would be to make a km wide Gw array on Earth, but building and powering it in space seems much, much harder. Just harvesting the GW takes 3 million solar panels. Just getting that to orbit seems unlikely. Even with very generous 1kg per panel we get 3 million kg to put in orbit, or 21 Falcon Heavy at max payload, or two years of putting nothing but solar panels up. It's so much.
And then how much money is going to make the gram scale probe appear?
Edit0: to clarify, the probe will have less time than the duration of the blink of an eye to take measurements. That's limiting what you can learn AND makes it very hard to aim correctly.
When you have the means to harvest and beam out a GW in space, it is not like the only use for it would be sending those probes. Seems like damn useful infrastructure for almost anything else. So, we can expect the hurdles to be overcome for other purposes as well...
Betting against humans making breakthroughs is usually a bad bet. As the saying goes: "You can say 'it can't be done' all you want, but please stay out of the way of those who are doing it."!
To the nearest interstellar object, when we will find one close to us. It's much more interesting than another star, because it may preserve the history of our galaxy in it deposits.
Edit0:typo