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Interstellar Travel? NOW?

Maybe you saw, maybe you haven't yet, but Stephen Hawking and other scientists have recently been talking in the media about travelling to another star system. That's fancy talk for another solar system! Like ours, but, different, and very, VERY far away. But how is it that we are planning to send space crafts out that far into deep space when we can't even get humans out of Earth's own orbit? How are we able to send something that far and be alive to witness it, if it took us over 20 years to just get a spacecraft past Pluto? And this star system is way, way farther than Pluto relative to us. Like, unfathomably far. 

Well, as interesting as it seems, you're probably overthinking it. If I make a rocket and launch it into space, it will take A LOT of energy to get that rocket out of our atmosphere and into space, because it weighs a lot and gravity is a bitch. Well, and a blessing so we don't float away, but in this case, it's a bitch. Then, to make such a big spacecraft move while in space also requires energy and we don't have an energy source (yet) that realistically could allow such a craft to travel to another star system fast enough. BUT, how would I be able to make something go faster? Shrink it! Duh.

If I have a house and a cell phone, which one could I accelerate, or move, the easiest? Obviously the phone, because it's damn small in comparison. It would be able to travel the same distance as the house with a fraction of the energy. Simple logic right?

So now think of that phone in space. How can I get this phone to move around without a fuel source? Hmmmm.... for this, we'll need to think back to the 1800s. Remember boats? Yeah! They float. Pretty neat stuff, but before we knew about motors, we needed these wooden floats to move. So they threw giant sheets up to "catch" wind and move the boat. Worked like a charm. 

So back to space, if I have a spacecraft with no "motor" (local energy source), and I put a "sail" on it to "catch" wind, it should move, right!? Welllll, there isn't exactly wind in space, BUT, there is something we can use instead. THE SUN! Yeah! The Sun emits a ton of energy everywhere and all the time. That's the idea behind the LightSail® by the Planetary Society you may or may not have heard about.

Okay Jay, that's great, but how can our sun provide enough energy to push a tiny space sail boat to another star system? Well, it can't. I mean eventually maybe but it would take forever. So now we need something stronger than the sun. Uh oh, what could that be?

LASERS. 

What's a laser but concentrated light? Now I'm not talking about a laser pointer because that doesn't carry much energy at all, but if we can develop a laser that has Gigawatts (1 with 9 zeros after it) of power, and shoot it at our space sail, we could potentially accelerate that tiny little ship to 1/5th the speed of light! 

Now that may not seem fast compared to the actual speed of light, but it's @$^#&$* times faster than we've ever gone before. 

That's the idea behind how we are attempting interstellar travel.

Now obviously we want to send this space sail boat as soon as possible because even at that ridiculous speed, it will still take a long time to get there. I won't quote numbers but it was greater than a decade, might have been two if I recall. 

Cool, so we get this thing to the other star system. Then what? What happens to it then?

Well, the plan is to develop the tech to send it, then send it, THEN start developing the tech to actually receive the signals it sends back to us. Which would take years to communicate back and forth, but think about it! We would be communicating between interstellar space! I don't know if that gets you excited, but it sure as hell makes me excited to see just how far we as humans can go!




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