Stephen Hawking he doesn't stop, and joins investors and wealthy patrons to discover space. The goal is to find life forms, and to reach Alpha Centaurs in a few years.
Hawking joined forces with Russian billionaire and philanthropist Yuri Milner and with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: the three announced the launch of one of the most ambitious missions in space exploration, costing approximately $100 million. The project is called “Breakthrough San Francisco Rush“and will search for alien life.
First you will reach Alpha Centauri, the star system closest to ours, 4,37 light years away. Thanks to nanoprobes, small spaceships the size of a postage stamp, propelled by laser beams fired from Earth, the team of scientists wants to get to Alpha Centauri in just twenty years, compared to the 30 thousand it would take if we used the technologies present today.
“With beams of light, with a sail pushed by the light and with the spacecraft lightest spaceship ever built we can launch a mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation. Today we lay the foundation stone of the next great leap into the cosmos. Because we are human beings and it is in our nature fly“said Stephen Hawking in press conference in New York.
The project leader, Pete Worden, is the former director of NASA's AMES research center. “Earth – continued Hawking – is a wonderful place, but it might not last forever. Sooner or later we will have to look elsewhere and Breakthrough Starshot is the beginning of the journey.”
