RE: What Would Be The Best Postcard For Aliens?
Just spoke with the leaders of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative about this 2 weeks ago when they attended our Space conference.
The Breakthrough Starshot initiative was founded by Yuri Milner who invested 200 million USD to enable breakthrough research to enable interstellar travel, search for intelligent life (SETI), and the ability to communicate with aliens. It is also supported by Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg.
Anyways, they presented one of the concepts they are working on, using ground based lasers to power up a space craft that use solar sails to speed it up to 20% the speed of light. They hope to send ~100 of these in the direction of planets orbiting other stars that have the potential to harvest intelligent life as we know it. (The high number is to ensure that at least some make it to the final destination).
So here's the catch. If a spacecraft traveling with that speed were to hit the planet we are targeting, it would have the energy of quite a number of atomic bombs upon impact. I wonder what kind of signal that would send, when their first encounter with us is us sending a bunch of kamikaze spacecrafts crashing into their home planet :P .
I can only imagine a civilisation more advanced than ours which have studied us from a far for centuries and then suddenly we make our first "hello" by crashing spacecrafts into their homes lol.
Anyways fun topic. Hope to discuss this a lot more with people on this platform who share the same level of enthusiasm about space!
Yes, I have read about this idea a lot and it seems like a good one, at least as far as searching for life goes. I have also read someone say that, as important as it is to travel fast, we also need effective braking system. Like you said, not being able to stop if and when we come across any alien life and crashing into their planet could lead to consequences.
It really is a fun topic to talk about. I am really looking forward to reading more of your posts :)
Indeed it is! I hope to cover this topic a lot in my future posts. Having just posted my introduction post to steemit on Sunday I am looking forward to getting to know this community more, and engage with those who share my passion for the subject.
Started following you, and hope we can have many interesting exchanges in the posts ahead :)
I had read that post before but surprisingly I forgot to upvote it. My bad! hehe. Upvoted it now.
I look forward to the interesting exchanges too :)