A brand new world awaits ., Puts matters in perspective. Options

[SirWilliam]

Thought this may be a little light relief to the antics of May , JC and the Brexiteers .( available on itunes ).

Saw a report today that the eminent physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawkins has concluded that Man needs to prepare plans to leave this planet in the not to distant future . ( Sorry to all you geeks out there but I have not the foggiest how to post a link on here ).
Anyway he has proposed building a small spacecraft called a starchip , ( just a few inches in length ) , which will travel along laser beams at a fifth the speed of light , ( roughly 100,000,000 mph ) , reaching it's proposed destination , Alpha Centauri , in a mind blowing 25 years .
Though it would not be able to land it would send back images in the hope that it would show a habitable world that we could exploit , ( my words not his ) , though getting there may be a little problematic .

The debatable question is...........should we even consider it ? It is assumed that the reason we have not been "visited "by intelligent life forms is 1 . The distances involved , and 2 . Intelligent life is probably extremely rare as they have undoubtedly destroyed themselves by war or disease before attaining the ability to transverse the cosmos .

[spartacus]

Well it would need the 'Starchip' to be powered by dilithium crystals. Thought Einstein boiled down to anything with mass couldn't travel faster than the speed of light...

[Simon Kirby]

Well it would need the 'Starchip' to be powered by dilithium crystals. Thought Einstein boiled down to anything with mass couldn't travel faster than the speed of light...

Einstein's Special Relativity prohibits anything passing the light-barrier because of how the apparent mass increases as you get to relativistic speeds, but travelling faster than the speed of light is actually fine - it's just getting there that's the problem. That might sound like a quibbling distinction but quantum effects can allow just that kind of trick, though not for anything as big as a spaceship, even a tiny one.

The problem with faster-than-light travel is more fundamental that Einstein because of how it violates causality, though that's not necessarily a barrier, it would just make faster-than-light travel really really weird.

Anyhoo, the plan is to accelerate the micro-spaceship to a quarter of the speed of light so not through the light barrier. There'd be a relativistic inrease in mass, but I guess it could be done. I've no idea if anything like it has been tried - accelerating a microchip to a quarter of the speed of light and sending it six light years away on a trip taking 25 years powered only by photon pressure from an earth-born laser all sounds pretty bleeding-edge to me, but if you can keep the beam from diverging and keep the chip in the beam and heading in the right direction then I guess it would work if the beam doesn't just evaporate the chip! Whether the camera and transmitter would work after 25 years exposure to cosmic rays and such, and whether it would have the power to send its images all the way home again is anyone's guess.