By David Perlman, San Francisco Chronicle
Yuri Milner, the Silicon Valley billionaire who has already committed $100 million to scientific efforts seeking radio evidence of alien life in the universe, announced Tuesday he is adding a second $100 million to expand the quest by sending swarms of tiny robot spacecraft into interstellar space.
The one-time Moscow physicist envisions thousands of ships he calls “nanocrafts,” someday speeding at 100 million miles an hour to stars light-years away, powered only by the pressure of light beams from arrays of space-borne lasers.
Milner’s money will finance research and engineering programs designed to prove that the concepts of the project he calls “Breakthrough Starshot” could become possible within a generation, he said.
His first $100 million grant targeted expansion of the UC Berkeley-based “SETI listen” program whose astronomers at observatories around the world are listening and looking for radio signals and bursts of laser light that might be carrying messages from intelligent civilizations across the universe.
Under the Berkeley program, astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, W.Va., have begun scanning “a few hundred stars” for SETI radio signals, said Andrew Siemion, an astronomer at the project in Berkeley. And the new telescope at UC’s Lick Observtory near San Jose, known as the Automated Planet Finder, has been programmed to scan for strange optical signals that could be coming in laser beams from ET, Siemion said.
No signals have been received yet, he said, “but things are going great.”
Milner, whose fortune is estimated at nearly $3 billion, announced his new donation Tuesday in New York, where he was joined by Stephen Hawking, the famed English cosmologist. Advances in technology are coming so fast today that all the elements of an interstellar SETI search should be possible within a generation, Milner said.
A single chip, for example, by then would be a “gram-scale wafer” weighing less than an ounce carrying miniaturized cameras, thrusters, power supplies, and systems for navigation and communication, he said.
A single mothership would carry swarms of the “nanocrafts” to high orbits at once, he said. The tiny spacecraft would carry huge, lightweight sails — “each no more than a few hundred atoms thick,” he said — propelled by the pressure of light beams from phased arrays of earth-bound, mountaintop lasers generating hundreds of millions of kilowatts at a time.
“We hope to demonstrate the lightweight payload and sail technologies within a decade,” said Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist who heads Milner’s advisers for the Breakthrough Starshot project, in an email interview. “Interstellar travel is challenging, but based on these technical advances, we believe there is a path forward without obvious show-stoppers.
“If we are lucky, it’s a couple of decades.”
The immediate goal, he said, “is to find out if we can potentially overcome all the challenges involved.”
Milner proposes sending the first fleet of hundreds of tiny spacecraft to hunt for SETI signals from planets around Earth’s closest stars, the Alpha Centauri star system, which is 25 trillion miles, or 4.37 light-years away.
Today’s fastest spacecraft would take 30,000 years to get there, but the “nanocrafts,” Milner envisions, would speed there in only 20 years.
©2016 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
