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It is stated multiple times across the article that the probe would need a means of changing is trajectory, but not even a hint of idea how that could possibly be done is given. So the most important and blocking aspect of the mission is simply skimmed over, and the rest of it is built upon this omission as if it was something trivial to come up with.

Does anyone have an idea how to equip a 1g spacecraft with any means to steer itself at 1/3 speed of light? The kinetic energy at that speed would seem to require something very incompatible with the weight constraint, to my understanding.

Related: "Project Solar Sail" by Arthur-Clarke and others, is a good anthology (stories, essays and illustrations) about the new Age of Sailing (Sailing in Space)via lightships and solar sails.

Isn't Relativistic time dilation a problem for this idea? To the probe, the trip is only a few centuries but to us on Earth, millions of years. Maybe 0.1c isn't enough to cause this to be a huge problem but I think it is. Perhaps one of you Einstein enjoyers can tell us for certain.

The most aggressive yet most realistic project we could reasonably do is the SGL Telescope

Won't happen under this administration and really might take a planet-wide effort but it would be incredible

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/07/22/solar-gravitation...

https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/a-mission-to-reach-th...

How a nanoprobe (required by the propulsion solution) can send data back to us from >10 ly away?

What’s be super cool is discovering a! asteroid mass primordial black hole in our solar system. No epic interstellar flight needed.

It would be super hard to detect though. We’d have to spot it by gravitational effects or get very lucky and notice lensing. It would emit nothing unless it happened to be nomming on some matter, and even then it’d be so small that the signal would be weak.

Seems like first we need to get out of the gravity well... Then we need to cure ageing to give people skin in these games... Then we need to crack FTL or find a way to cryo-sleep or we end up with dystopian science fiction ships of the damned...

Not in my lifetime I suspect...

How do you stop if your solar sail has you going near light speed? Or does it strand you halfway between stars in the doldrums where the force on both sides of your sail equals out from two stars?

build very large optical interometric telescopes, put the in geosycrenous orbit or L², and point them at various gravitational lenses in the universe till something interesting shows up, like the well lit event horison of a black hole surrounded by bright stars. given starships load carrying capacity, previos mass restrictions, are gone, with cost guaranteed to be dramaticaly less, and time frames that will get public interest, plus the same instrument can be used to image exoplanets surface's at high resolutions et say cheese

Sied

Such a fantastic overview. And here we are, instead of building the infrastructure for accelerating solar sails, we're investing the money in AI-pornbots instead :/

What is the point of such a mission? There is literally nothing to see there.

Having read Michael Crichton's Sphere, I think I know how this ends.