• wraekscadu@vargar.org
    9·
    28 days ago

    Breakthrough starshot.

    It needs a relatively small amount of funding. Essentially a 100 gigawatt powerplant, strapped to a 1kmx1km array of lasers. Very lightweight probes (that could potentially be mass manufactured) propelled by these lasers.

    If it comes to fruition, we could have probes that we can send to nearly our entire stellar neighborhood at significant fractions of the speed of light.

    We could:

    • Get a constant stream of pictures and data of exoplanets within our stellar neighborhood.
    • Send these lightweight probes WITHIN HOURS/DAYS inside our solar system.
    • Very rapidly send exploratory probes to any given object. Another Omuamua comes in? Yep, we’re getting to it in hours baybee.

    Literally SciFi stuff that we can achieve with little bit of development in material science. Again, the bottleneck is FUNDING, not technological. But come on, it’s so worth it!

    • SpatchyIsOnline@lemmy.world
      3·
      27 days ago

      I’ve always been confused why Breakthrough Starshot always showed the square km laser array on the ground instead of a bunch of satellites in orbit. That way you wouldn’t have to account for atmospheric attenuation of the lasers PLUS you could probably get military funding for putting a gigawatt of laser capacity in orbit lmao.

      Like sure, the likes of Starlink were still just getting going when Breakthrough Starshot was conceptualised, so the idea of a large satellite constellation probably wasn’t on their radar yet, but at the same time - they were talking about sending thousands of probes to Proxima Centauri so it’s a mystery to me why they didn’t see that kind of technological progress being possible by the time we were doing that

      • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        26 days ago

        you could probably get military funding for putting a gigawatt of laser capacity in orbit

        …and without causing political problems!