The Search Begins: Stephen Hawking And Russian Billionaire To Send Probes Looking For Alien Life-Forms

Russian billionaire and internet entrepreneur Yuri Milner accompanied by Nobel-prizing-winning physicist Stephen Hawking, announced back in April that he is investing 100 million dollars into his Breakthrough Starshot  Project, with a goal of sending a fleet of probes to Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring star, in search of life.

"Earth is a beautiful place, but it might not last forever," Hawking says in a press release. "Sooner or later we must look to the stars." Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Hawking both are said to join Milner on the board of directors. Pete Worden, former director of NASA's Ames Research Center, has signed on as executive director, according to the press release.

Why Alpha Centauri?

The system is not just the closest one, researchers also think an Earth-like planet may orbit Alpha Centauri B, believes New Scientist. "The discovery ... provides an obvious target for a flyby mission," Avi Loeb, a Starshot mission advisory committee chair, wrote in an email to Business Insider. Noting that exisiting telescopes can't photograph the new planet, Loeb added: "The curiosity to know more about the plan will give the Starshot initiative a sense of urgency." 

The Project

"Breakthrough Starshot," the program Milner is backing, intends to squeeze all the key components of a robotic probe into tiny gram-scale "nanocraft." These would be small enough to boost to enormous speeds using other technology the program plans to help develop, including a ground-based kilometer-scale laser array capable of beaming 100-gigawatt laser pulses through the atmosphere for a few minutes at a time, and atoms-thin, meter-wide "light sails" to ride those beams to other stars, pushing a nanocraft  to relativistic speeds.

Is it really possible?

"There are about 20 key challenges we are asking the world's scientific experts to help us with-and we are willing to financially support their work," Pete Worden, former Director NASA's ARC, tells The New York Times.

Milner believes that the technology will advance to the point where this is possible, targeting the Atacama Desert for the laser array. "If you have a reasonable sized battery, and a reasonable sized array, and a reasonable sized power station, you probably can do one shot a day," Milner states. "And then you recharge and shoot again. You can launch one per day for a year and then you have hundreds on the way."

At this point Starshot already has a prototype for the StarChip. It's smaller than an iPhone, and it will be backed with cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, navigation, and communication equipment. "Even if Proxima B doesn't support life", Loeb says, "It's still important to explore the not-so-distant world."