According to professors at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Philip Lubin and Joel Rothman, the present is the golden age of astronomy. “The Apollo trips to the moon were among the most important events of my life, and those memories still take my breath away,” said Rothman, a professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.
But half a century has passed since the Apollo program, and humanity’s knowledge of the universe and the technology to explore it have improved dramatically since then. That’s why Rothman and experimental cosmologist Lubin began to think about what to do next – what it would take for living beings to set out on a journey to the nearest star outside our solar system. They described it in an article that published in the journal Acta Astronautica.
To the stars
According to the study’s authors, the biggest challenge for interstellar travel is the huge distance between the Earth and the nearest stars. Voyager missions have proventhat humanity is capable of sending objects over a distance of over twelve billion kilometers, which is needed to leave the bubble surrounding our solar system, the so-called heliosphere.
Probes the size of a car, which moved at speeds of over 60,000 kilometers per hour, but flew there in the long 40 years. Moreover, their distance from Earth is only a tiny fraction of the space that separates our planet from the nearest star. Voyager probes would have reached this at a similar rate for over 80,000 years.
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This challenge is the main theme of Lubin’s work, in which he presents the technology that would be needed to achieve another solar system. According to him, traditional chemical propulsion (ie today’s rocket fuel) is excluded because it is not and cannot be able to provide the necessary amount of energy for the vessel to move fast enough. At the same time, its weight and the systems needed to propel it are not suitable for the giant speeds that a ship traveling to another star must reach.
That’s why new propulsion technologies are needed – and that’s where the University of California’s light research program comes into play.
Probes in space, engines on Earth
“Never before has it been possible to propel macroscopic objects at speeds approaching the speed of light,” says Lubin, who works as a professor in the physics department. The main obstacle is the mass of the body, which precludes any human missions at greater distances in the foreseeable future.
His team therefore turned to robots and photonics. Small probes with on-board instruments that read, collect and transmit data back to Earth could be powered by light using a laser system located on Earth or on the Moon. In this way, they could reach twenty to thirty percent of the speed of light. The advantage of this drive, which also proposes the Breakthrough project, the main thing is that there is no need to transport the engine into space, it actually remains on Earth.
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A laser beam would propel such a probe much like a wind drives a sailboat to its target. “It would probably look like a semiconductor wafer with a shield that would protect it from radiation and dust bombardment as it flew through an interstellar environment,” says Lubin. “For a start, it would probably be as big as a human hand.”
However, he said, such basic technologies could be easily modified to larger sizes, such as propelling much larger spacecraft within our solar system at lower speeds, potentially enabling human missions to Mars. Lubin states that the journey to the Red Planet would take only one month with this drive, which would be about a nine-fold reduction compared to current possibilities.
At these relativistic speeds – about 100 million kilometers per hour – such a “sailboat” would reach the nearest solar system, Proximy Centauri, in about twenty years.
The basic project to develop a plan to achieve relativistic flight via directional energy is supported by NASA and private foundations, such as the Starlight interstellar program run by the University of California, and in particular the Breakthrough Initiatives funded by billionaires Julia and Yuri Milner. He has several subprojects – some are looking for signals from other civilizations in space, others are analyzing data, while Breakthrough Starshot aims to invent transport to the stars.
The author of the idea of this drive was the famous physicist Stephen Hawkingwho participated in the Breakthrough program.
Life on the road through emptiness
“When I learned that the weight of these vessels could reach several grams, or even more, it was clear to me that live animals could fit in them,” says Rothman, who realized that the first Earthlings to travel between stars, for example, could be worms – specifically nematodes called nematodes.
It is the research of these organisms that the scientist has been engaged in for decades; According to him, they meet most of the requirements that should be placed on an interstellar astronaut: “They are small and simple, but they are experimentally perfect creatures,” says Rothman.
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