Stephen Hawking Supports Interstellar Travel Program

Stephen Hawking is backing a project that would send a tiny spacecraft to a star system trillions of miles away within a generation. If successful, the spacecraft would have traveled farther than any other craft.

Hawking told BBC News that interstellar travel fantasy could come true sooner than expected. He said that humanity must set out to the stars to survive as a species.

"Astronomers believe that there is a reasonable chance of an Earth-like planet orbiting one of the stars in the Alpha Centauri system. But we will know more in the next two decades from ground-based and space-based telescopes," said Hawking.

Billionaire Yuri Milner funded a $100 million research program which aims to develop a spacecraft the size of a computer chip. The program is supported by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Milner's Breakthrough Foundation is a private organization and one of its programs is being backed by Hawking, according to a feature by the CS Monitor.

A group of scientists were brought together by the organization to assess whether a spacecraft could be developed that can travel to another star within a generation and can also send information back.

With the current technology, it would take about 30,000 years to get to the nearest star system 25 trillion miles away. However, the experts concluded that journey time could be cut to 30 years with just a little more research and development.

The idea is to reduce the size of the spaceship to roughly the size of a computer chip. A thousand of these mini spaceship will then be launched into the Earth's orbit. Each would have a solar sail which functions like a boat sail - except that it will be pushed by light and not wind, according to a feature by the PopSci.

The project is expected to encounter a lot of problems including making miniature instruments, cameras and sensors that could fit on the chip, developing solar sails that can withstand being blasted by a powerful laser, and finding a way of getting the pictures and information about the star system back to Earth.