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Comment by adaml_623 | Hacker News Reader

What scientific return are we getting from a gram sized probe moving at 30,000 km per second?

If you have enough of them, you get data from Alpha Centauri within a human (natural) lifetime. Plus the bragging rights, I guess, Starshot is after all a private endeavour.

Modern silicon design with mems sensors I suspect could do an awful lot with a gram.

Also, at this scale, not much can be done by hand, so you can make hundreds of them for not much more cost than doing one.

And how do you get the data back from these probes? The voyagers have antennas that are close to 4 meters in diameter and ~25-watt radio transmitters. You aren't doing that in a gram, and you aren't powering that in a gram either.

Just go read the starshot proposal. They address all of these issues, some more convincingly than others but they have thought it out in great detail.

In short, it’s a swarm of gram-scale probes and they work together to transmit.

Doesn't modern electronics require massive shielding?

e.g. you would need too much shielding and would go over the 1 gram restriction.

If you have enough of them you can just lose some fraction and still function.

Also it may work out that a lighter, faster probe with a shorter service life could have a greater effective range, if the service life is less sensitive to weight changes than the speed is

Right, that’s a nice way of thinking about it.

The claim was that it would always be the furthest man made object in the universe. Nothing about it being useful or scientific.

If its not useful, it's not going to be launched and accelerated that long.

People do things for shits and giggles all the time. SpaceX literally launched a model Tesla for absolutely no reason other than advertising both themselves and their sister company.

Doubly so if they can now become “the furthest man made object”. That’s massive free marketing.

It may also be exponentially easier to do so in the future, lowering the expenditure needed to make it happen.

It might not be reasonable right now, but, once again, the bar was set at always. That is an exceptionally high bar with very little reasoning behind it.

They absolutely had way more of a reason than no reason. Za reason for the Tesla launch was that it was the first falcon 9 heavy launch, and no company was willing to gamble that large of a payload on a untested rocket. So they made the best of it with a PR stunt.

They literally could have sent up anything and it certainly wasn’t useful, which was GP’s only criteria for being launched.

Today: almost certainly nothing In a decade: almost certainly very little In a century: almost certainly more than the Voyager

Assuming climate change doesn't prevent any kind of launch or most further research.

Wouldn’t the reduction in atmospheric density due to warming make it easier to reach orbit, etc?

Yes but widespread flooding, drought, crop failures and economic collapses etc. would make it much harder to devote resources towards such launches.

>scientific return

that comes after 'someone out there' misinterprets our super fast gram probes as weaponry and conquers our world for the sake of their own spacecraft safety.

it's ingenious really, let's antagonize a greater power into wormhole-bridge hopping over here so we can reverse engineer their tech.

/s , hopefully.

If they are so much as inconvenienced by our probes, they are not a greater power but bumbling roboticists like us.

1 gram at an appreciable amount of c is about as much energy as a nuke. Getting hit by a swarm of these while on a Sunday drive would fuck you up, no matter how powerful you are.

The real reason there isn’t a moon colony? Person gets fired and loses their shit, starts tossing 1-2 km sized rocks down the gravity well and … we all die.

Throwing shit in space is a sure fire way to piss off any species.

It would take an insane amount of energy to throw that rock.

To throw a 100 meter rock that would wipe out NY city (and then some), we could do that with modern technology... assuming the rocket never had to slow down.

But you only need one. Maybe two for good measure

Same with a nuke or an engineered pathogen. Throwing rocks from the Moon is less practical though, people would see you setting up the universe's biggest launch pad or railgun for years. It would be the least stealthy, most telegraphed apocalypse possible.

It only takes a 50-meter (radius) rock to destroy a city, a 240-meter rock to destroy an entire region, and a 4 km rock to destroy the planet.

So, I guess it depends on what you want to accomplish, whether they see it coming or not.

"Only". Those are huge! Especially when you consider the city you have to build around them to launch the damn things.

The required delta-v isn't all that much from the moon, and it's more about the mass and speed than the actual shape of the rock.

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