and one that could be reachable by tiny,
unmanned space probes before the end of the century, in time for some
people alive today to witness it.
What planet did that quote come from?
4 light years in 84 years. Plus time for the radio signals to come back? Heh.
I for one feel much more upbeat and confident from this news, knowing that some long into the future form of life that I cannot possibly even imagine with any assurance of accuracy with which which I may, or may not, have some common ancestry, may, or may, not, be able to depart from this planet bound on a journey that will take well over 100,000 years to get to b-Proxima Centauri, in hopes that the Red Dwarf around which it is hurtling has no all boiled off.
And in expectation of that possible fate, we should all do our utmost to get wean ourselves off the colors blue, green and purple, because they’ll be of no value at all on b-Proxima and even having the capacity to discern them may well result in immediate blindness.
Thanks a bunch, Science!
They were referencing “Breakthrough Starshot” in that estimate. It’s a pie in the sky project that’s borderline Chemtrails worthy in it’s absurdity. From Wiki:
Technical challenges
Light propulsion requires enormous power: a laser with a gigawatt of power (approximately the output of a large nuclear plant) would provide only a few newtons of thrust.[13] The spaceship will compensate for the low thrust by having to have a mass of only a few grams. The camera, computer, communications laser, a plutonium power source, and the solar sail must be miniaturized to fit within a mass limit.[13][14] All components must be engineered to endure extreme acceleration, cold, vacuum, and protons.[12] The spacecraft will have to survive collisions with space dust;
Starshot expects each square centimeter of frontal cross-section to
collide at high speed with about a thousand particles of size 0.1 micron and up.[13][15] Focusing a set of lasers totaling one hundred gigawatts onto the solar sail will be difficult, due to atmospheric turbulence. According to The Economist, at least a dozen off-the-shelf technologies will need to improve by orders of magnitude.[13]
I was reading something recently about a method of propulsion that would make it possible to achieve about 10% of the speed of light, which would make the trip 40 years . . . can’t remember the details at the moment.