Fly me to … Alpha Centauri: Last Tuesday marked 55 years since Soviet Union cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, leaving Earth in the Vostok 1 spacecraft, in which Gagarin spent 108 minutes, completing the first human orbit around the Earth before landing back on Soviet soil. We’ve come a long way since then, and superstar physicist Stephen Hawking thinks we should be aiming much farther. Hawking announced his backing of a USD 100 mn research program to send a computer chip-sized spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, our nearest star, 40 tn km away. The program was launched by Russian bn’aire Yuri Milner and supported by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. With current technology, it would take about 30,000 years to get there, a future so distant, the survival of humans isn’t even guaranteed by the time it arrives.

In fact, the issue of the human race’s survival is in the forefront of the program backers’ minds: “if we are to survive as a species we must ultimately spread out to the stars … Astronomers believe that there is a reasonable chance of an Earth-like planet orbiting one of the stars [in] the Alpha Centauri system,” Hawking says. Caveating it with a big “if it works,” the NYT explains the concept, “a rocket would deliver a ‘mother ship’ carrying a thousand or so small probes to space. Once in orbit, the probes would unfold thin sails and then, propelled by powerful laser beams from Earth, set off one by one like a flock of migrating butterflies across the universe. Within two minutes, the probes would be more than 600,000 miles from home — as far as the lasers could maintain a tight beam — and moving at a fifth of the speed of light. But it would still take 20 years for them to get to Alpha Centauri. Those that survived would zip past the star system, making measurements and beaming pictures back to Earth.” Milner believes we can be deploying our first “nanocraft” within a generation.