How a spaceship the size of a postage-stamp could find humanity’s new home planet
Sending a tiny spaceship to the nearest habitable planet at 20% of the speed of light? No problem, says theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.
Michio Kaku: We’ve been brainwashed into thinking—by Hollywood—that a starship has to be huge and gigantic, the size of the Enterprise.
However, the laws of physics make possible sending postage stamp-sized chips to the nearby stars.
So think of a chip perhaps this big on a parachute, and have thousands of them sent into outer space energized by perhaps 800 megawatts of laser power. By shooting this gigantic bank of laser energy into outer space, by energizing all these mini parachutes you could then begin to accelerate of them to about 20 percent the speed of light.
This is with doable technology today; it’s just a question of engineering. It’s a question of political will and economics, but there’s no physics, there’s no law of physics preventing you from shooting these chips to 20 percent the speed of light.
That means Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri triple star system, could be within the range of such a device. Now think about that, that means that within 20 years, after 20 years of launch we might be able to have the first starship go to a nearby planet. And it turns out that Proxima Centauri B is an Earth-like planet that circles around the closest star to the planet Earth. What a coincidence.
It means that we’ve already staked out our first destination for visitation by an interstellar starship and that is Proxima Centauri B, a planet that goes around one of the stars in the triple star system. And so this could be the first of many different kinds of starship designs.
In my book The Future of Humanity, I go through many of the possible design including fusion rockets, ramjet fusion rockets, including antimatter rockets.
Some of these rockets, of course, or technologies won’t be available till the next 100 years, but remember we’re talking about the future of humanity, and the future of humanity I think could be in outer space.
Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku doesn't just hope that humanity finds its way onto other planets... he's even picked out the ones we should be moving to — Proxima Centauri B, in the Alpha Centauri triple star system. He's even suggested that the next great space exploration could happen on a spaceship the size of a postage stamp, traveling 20% the speed of light, sent by using high-powered lasers. It sounds like a wild theory, but if anyone's wild theories could come true in the next 100 years, it's probably Michio Kaku. His latest book is The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth.
Outer space capitalism: The legal and technical challenges facing the private space industry
The private sector may need the Outer Space Treaty to be updated before it can make any claims to celestial bodies or their resources.
- The Outer Space Treaty, which was signed in 1967, is the basis of international space law. Its regulations set out what nations can and cannot do, in terms of colonization and enterprise in space.
- One major stipulation of the treaty is that no nation can individually claim or colonize any part of the universe—when the US planted a flag on the Moon in 1969, it took great pains to ensure the world it was symbolic, not an act of claiming territory.
- Essentially to do anything in space, as a private enterprise, you have to be able to make money. When it comes to asteroid mining, for instance, it would be "astronomically" expensive to set up such an industry. The only way to get around this would be if the resources being extracted were so rare you could sell them for a fortune on Earth.
Physicists solve a 140-year-old mystery
Scientists discover the inner workings of an effect that will lead to a new generation of devices.
- Researchers discover a method of extracting previously unavailable information from superconductors.
- The study builds on a 19th-century discovery by physicist Edward Hall.
- The research promises to lead to a new generation of semiconductor materials and devices.
Breast cancer vaccine could be available in 8 years, says Mayo Clinic
A new immunotherapy treatment is showing positive signs in early-stage clinical trials.
- Clinical trials of an immunotherapy treatment for breast cancer showed positive signs, and the researchers hope to move to larger trials in coming years.
- Immunotherapies train the body's immune system to find and kill cancer cells without harming healthy cells.
- Recent trials of immunotherapies for other cancers have also showed positive signs.
