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Comment by kilroy123 | Hacker News Reader

I really really want project Starshot to become a reality. I think this is our best bet for scoping out these near by star systems. At least within our lifetime.

If we could hit 50% speed of light we could do a fly-by mission in ~25 years. Then another 12 years waiting for the data. Honestly, ~37-40 years isn't bad for an interstellar mission. Remember the Voyager program has been going on for that long! So we already have experience with long space missions.

https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Initiatives#Break...

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The other project that needs to become a reality FAST is the construction of a telescope large enough to measure the spectra of exoplanets. Because once you find a habitable planet with oxygen in its atmosphere, you now have an irrefutable and pressing case to move fast with Breakthrough Starshot.

Sadly it's going to likely a require 100metre telescope mirror or larger, and current science funding only has a 30metre telescope mirror in the works. The 100 metre telescope was cancelled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope

The answer is at our fingertips, yet the science community can't get the money to build something that would be a fraction of what F-35 fighter jets cost.

What the !@#$ are we doing as a human race...

You know about the SKA, right?

At first I thought you were making a joke about the human race prioritizing Ska[0] over new telescopes, but then I realized I wasn't on reddit and saw the "the".

What is SKA? Super K? Aperture?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska

square kilometer array

Could the Square Kilometre Array, by measuring in the radio frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum, actually be capable of directly imaging the nearby spectroscopic signatures of exoplanets?

I thought you needed to be capable of directly imaging the light of an exoplanet in other wavelengths in order to do that.

Here ya go http://skatelescope.org/cradle-life/

pick it up pick it up pick it up

I hope Elon Musk reads your inquiry

I would incredibly surprised if he hasn't already thought about similar things. I remember in an interview last year he stated that the Interplanetary Transport System SpaceX is building for whisking humans to mars and other celestial objects in the solar system will be tiny in comparison to the spaceships that humanity will build in the latter half of this century. Bear in mind, the ITS has more than 3x the lift-off thrust of the Saturn V, which is the largest rocket ever built.

Actually, it does not. Musk announced recently that the ITS would be a lot smaller, actually being slightly smaller than the Saturn V, as he couldn't get as many subsidies as he expected to.

Paul Allen provided a lot of the funding for SETI Institute's radio array design and construction, but operational budget has been really tough.

It's not quite enough to build the instruments. We have to fund the ongoing science, too. Philanthropy does play a role here, too, of course: endowments for academic research, but generally not as inspiring as making Very Large objects.

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