Steven Hawking wants to send tiny 'nanocraft' space probes to Alpha Centauri

boing
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Plato & Socrates also had a bit of an issue with us featherless bipeds.

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Its the nearest star system to our own. Theres three stars in it the nearest to us is proxima centuri.
It’s only visible from the southern hemisphere.

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He wants to have a great arrow in space pointing out earth to advanced alien civilizations? Has he considered what they might do to us?

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What I like about this plan is that it isn’t extravagant and let’s-put-all-our-eggs-in-one-basket, as with previous “big starship” proposals like Daedalus. We’re not building one gargantuan vessel over a span of decades at God-knows-what expense, only to have the thing hit a stray asteroid on the way out. Instead we’re sending one tiny probe after another in rapid succession. Moreover, as our technology improves, we can upgrade the probes we’re sending. This seriously changes the game for me.

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It’s called Alpha Centauri (the brightest star in Centaurus) because the binary system of A and B appears visually as just one star - they are quite close - and C isn’t visible to the eye. The Wikipedia article is rather confusingly written and doesn’t explain that Alpha Centauri is a binary, or perhaps a triple, star

Basically “constellations” (which are not usually real star systems as the stars in them may be at very different distances) are numbered from the brightest star down in Greek, thus alpha, beta
(the letters of the Greek alphabet were also used as numbers in classical Greek). But some of those visual stars are in reality binary stars (two stars orbiting one another) or triple stars. The members of the binary or triple stars get labelled A,B,C. So Alpha Centauri A is the biggest of the stars that together form the visually single star Alpha Centauri. Don’t blame me, I didn’t make up the terminology.

To add to the fun the constallation is named Centaurus. So why Alpha Centauri A? Because the middle word is Latin and is in the genitive (I think
Latin rusty) meaning Alpha of Centaurus.
There’s a lot of this creaking, rusty old scientific terminology which is kept around for historical and effectionate reasons but, as knowledge of Greek and Latin recedes, is increasingly a barrier to understanding.

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Yes, as a matter of fact he has. Personally though I think that if aliens have the capability to travel across light years they’re already aware of all our rocky little world has to offer and if they haven’t gotten to us yet they’re either not interested or it’s only a matter of time.

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I dunno, these Geese fly and look pretty human to me.

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I know - just being a brat. It’s in my nature.

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If that were exactly true, that would make it a very special place. A bit like Brigadoon.
Visitors from all over the galaxy would come here just to see it.

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That’s gonna be one crazy game of Telephone.

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“He said the aliens are near.”

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They are going to accelerate to 0.25c in 2 minutes? How many g is that?

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Yeah but how would the galactic tourists know about it.

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Coming back is the opposite of easy. You have any suggestions?

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Of course we may be receiving this kind of thing already, we just don’t know.

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With a big enough receiver


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Heh.

(Have you ever taken a close look at the structure and life cycle of a T4 bacteriophage? You may be more right than you know. Little Buckyball space-probe capsules filled with DNA.)

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Has anyone at SETI checked their spam folder?

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They overheard us talking about it as if it were a thing.