Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Interstellar Dreams Turn Real

Episode Date: August 2, 2016

Philip Lubin and his former student Travis Brashears have had quite a year. Their bold plan to send tiny probes to nearby stars is now supported by NASA and the Breakthrough Starshot $100 million dollar initiative. Hear their amazing story.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

An extraordinary conversation about travel to the stars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome podcast listeners, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Something unprecedented today as we leave our regular format and possibly our senses for a very special conversation about plausible interstellar missions. My guests are UC Santa Barbara physicist Philip Lubin and his former intern-turned-partner Travis Brashears. At a little more than an hour, it is the longest interview we've ever aired as part of the regular show.

Because of that, Bruce Betts and What's Up are ever aired as part of the regular show. Because of that, Bruce Betts and What's Up are moving to the head of the show with Emily and Bill. Let's get started with the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, let's start with the hot one, and it's a hot photo. That's right. We're talking about the hot planet Venus, of course, and an image from my blog that actually uses heat to see Venus's clouds. You're looking at an image of Venus that is shot at a wavelength of two and a quarter microns. And at that temperature, Venus's lower atmosphere is blazing hot, radiating heat out into space,

but some of that is blocked by these very turbulent looking clouds. It's a really unusual image of Venus, part of a set that Akatsuki took and posted on the occasion of its first anniversary in orbit, its first Venus anniversary, that is. We'll skip the third rock from the sun and go on out to Mars and the surface of the red planet. Yeah, fittingly for the summer, both rovers Opportunity and Curiosity are road tripping right now. Curiosity is put on about half a kilometer south from the last drill site and during that time has traversed about 25 meters vertically, which means that it's about time to start drilling again.

So look for Curiosity to stick another drill hole in a Martian rock sometime in the next month. Meanwhile, Opportunity has finished the initial look at the Marathon Valley and is now road tripping around to the north side of the valley. I got to talk to John Cassani, manager of the Mars Exploration Rover's Opportunity. He is such a proud guy, and he has every right. Twelve and a half years of that rover crawling across the surface. And 43 kilometers now.

The odometer just ticked over. Absolutely incredible. All right, there's one more for us to talk about. That is out of Jupiter, where this is going to be a big month, but we still have to wait a little while. Yes, I'm really looking forward to August 27th. It'll be the first time that Juno has swung close to Jupiter since orbit insertion. On the occasion of orbit insertion, they weren't allowed to have their science instruments on. So this will be the first time that they get to use these science instruments very close to Jupiter. And of course,

in addition to science instruments, they also have the education and public outreach camera called JunoCam, which will give us our first amazing high resolution polar views of Jupiter, as well as the closest ever images of Jupiter's cloud tops if everything goes well. So keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned on August 27th. This is just a taste of what you can find in Emily's What's Up in the Solar System August 2016 edition. She just posted it. It is at, of course, planetary.org. Just look for her blog. It's a July 29th entry and will get us through an exciting month in the solar system. Thanks very much, Emily.

Thank you, Matt. Our senior editor, she is the planetary evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, I don't care. I want to believe that water is making gullies on Mars. I guess I do too, but you got to respect the facts. That's science.

Yeah, I'm sorry, man, but these gullies, not the recurring slope linear, everybody, not the RSLs, which were formed by water. These are other gullies that people presumed were formed in the, my understanding, presumed to be formed in the same way, were formed by something else. And I love the speculation, blocks, chunks of frozen solid carbon dioxide, blocks of dry ice sliding down hills on Mars. I mean, it's crazy if that's how it went. And they determined this, we determined this, by looking at the soil that is in these gullies. And you would expect to find clays, which are a result of water flowing,

some alkaline materials. But we don't find that. And when I say we, and I say they, we're talking about instruments aboard satellites in orbit around another planet. It's just cool. You guys, when we show they're probably not water, they're probably not water. We are learning so much about Mars.

It may not always be what we'd like to learn or what we wish we could learn, but it's the truth of another world. That's right. That's right. That's right. And I love it in the sense, Matt, that it's the process of science. When new information comes in, you revise your outlook, your knowledge about the other world. You change it. That is the wonderful nature of natural philosophy, the process of science. So it is exciting. The process of science. So it is exciting. Now, Matt, in other news that interests me particularly, a Japanese aerospace exploration agency is fighting for funding for their X-ray observatory. They want to fly again. And they're converting what you would call a sounding rocket, a rocket made to explore the atmosphere, converting that to fly CubeSats. So the Japanese aerospace JAXA is getting involved in CubeSats along with the rest of the world, which means there'll be a

bigger market for it, which means the price will come down, which means more people will be engaged in the journey and the adventure of space exploration. I mentioned just this one story. It's just cool. And the best of luck to JAXA as they try to remount that lost Hitomi X-ray telescope mission. And who knows, NASA may be helping out there as well. Bill, I love talking to you. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. Carry on. That's Bill Nye. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, getting some well-earned R&R, but still checking in with us. Time for What's Up with Bruce Betts on Planetary Society, getting some well-earned R&R, but still checking in with us. Time for What's Up with Bruce Betts on Planetary Radio. We are going to talk about the night sky,

but eventually we're going to get to this absolutely fascinating trivia question. I complimented you for it when you posed the question. Now many listeners have, and we've had almost a record response. So I'm excited about getting to that. Excellent. Well, in the evening sky over the next two or three, four weeks, you can watch Mars, Antares, the red star in Scorpius and Saturn moving relative to each other. They've been kind of just hanging out there, but now Mars will be moving between reddish Antares and yellowish Saturn over the next few

weeks. And then Perseid meteor shower, traditionally the second best meteor shower of the year after the Geminids. It's got some good news, bad news, bad news. There's moonlight in the evening. First of all, let me make sure I tell you, it peaks the night of August 11th and 12th, so the night beginning on the 11th. It is a broad peak, so you can be watching for Perseids from now to a week or two after the peak. There is moonlight in the early evening, but then after around midnight, depending on when you're looking, but around the peak, you actually, the sun the well

the sun will have set too but the moon will set and you'll have dark skies also some uh some predictors are predicting an outburst so a heavier than normal uh meteor rate it's usually around 60 to 100 meteors from a dark sky they say during the the peak, during a few hours, there may be up to 200 meteors per hour, but it's always tough to predict such things. Point is, go out, relax, stare up at the sky, and watch for meteors as we come up on the 11th, 12th. We move on to this week in space history. In 2011, Juno was launched. I've heard something about Juno recently. You're going to hear more later this month. And in 2012, this week, Curiosity landed on Mars. Still going strong.

Just doesn't seem like four years. We move on to random space. I didn't quite catch that. No, that's okay. It's quite all right. Go ahead. Comet Swift-Tuttle, the parent comet of the Perseid meteor shower, was noted in the sky by Chinese observers in both 69 BC and 188 AD.

Not bad. All right. We move on to the trivia question that you enjoyed so very, very much. I asked you if you landed at the same latitude and longitude on Earth as Apollo 11 landed on the moon, what country would you be in? How'd we do, Matt?

I guess good. Really, really good. As I said, a near record. Random.org picked out a first-time winner. It's Kendra Mullison from, get this, Poison, Montana. I love her answer. The landing site would be well within the boundaries of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,

although I'm sure the Congolese would be surprised we didn't take a more affordable mode of transport. She got it right, right? Yes, indeed. Pretty much everybody figured out that it was going to be in the Congo. And I got some examples for you after I tell you that Kendra has won a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account on that worldwide network of telescopes, non-profit network that you can use. Point them anywhere you like with your 200-point

or about $200 account. Todd Yampole of Chandler, Arizona. He said you'd be in dense jungle coming down at that spot in the Congo several days from the nearest town by moon buggy. And kind of in line with that, just to give you a place to go to, Pietro Carboni in Chester, New York, said the nearest restaurant, it's in the city of Kisangani. It's about 100 miles to the east. Well, it's closer than they were on the moon. We also heard from John Garashay, who said that it was solved, this answer, by the earth science students of the Grove Street Academy. So good on you, students there at Grove Street. Congratulations.

Good job. We got a great picture. I'm not going to use it, but Daniel Kazard actually dropped the lunar module into an African village with some cows around it. So thank you for that bit of Photoshop creativity. A couple of people, Mike Clark and Wesley Haynes, both decided to tell us where we would be on Mars with the same coordinates, and apparently would be in Arabia Terra, northeast of Chaparrali Crater, which just happens to be where Mark Watney had to get to on Mars to get to the Mars Ascent Vehicle and be rescued and make us all very happy, along with the studio that made the movie.

I had just two more. This from Dave Fairchild, our resident poet. The place Apollo landed back in 1969 has longitude and latitude, which I will now define. If moved to Earth and pasted there, then here is where you'd be, Republic of the Congo, Democratic DRC. I know, he's done a good job. I was going to

call it quits because we had so many of these, and I apologize to all of you who had equally great answers. We just don't have the time. But this from Mark Little, who says, I'm not obsessed, but I now plan to move my family to live there in the Republic of the Congo

on that exact spot so I can call our new home Tranquility Base. Wow, that is devotion. That is devotion. And he's moving from a nice place, too. And I think it's in Ireland, Port Stewart Island, actually. All right, we're finally ready for next week's question. And I got a great prize.

I've got a straightforward question for a change. What spacecraft flew past Comet Borelli in 2001? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You've got until the 9th of August. Can you believe the year is flying by? Tuesday, August 9 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to that new question from Bruce. And here's what you'll get. I ran into our friend Andy Weir, the author of

The Martian. He kindly signed another copy of the book. It's sort of just open copied, but we're going to give that signed copy of The Martian, it's a paperback copy, to whoever wins this one. And we'll throw in a rubber asteroid as well, Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and maybe an itelescope.net account too, if you're nice. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about mold, colored molding. Thank you, and good night. Is that how it got the name?

I never thought of that. Thank you. You learn so much on this show. I try to help. He's Bruce Betts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. And for you podcast listeners, stay tuned as we now go into a conversation

with Philip Lubin about interstellar travel. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us.

Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here with big news from the Planetary Society. We're rolling out a new membership plan with great benefits and expanded levels of participation. At the Planetary Society, passionate space fans like you join forces to create missions, nurture new science and technology, advocate for space, and educate the world. Details are at planetary.org forward slash membership. I'll see you around the solar system. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Get comfortable and fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a thrilling ride, beginning with a 30,000 G kick in the head. When we last talked with Philip Lubin and Travis

Beshears, they were getting ready to make a presentation about using a giant laser array to defend our planet from near-Earth objects. Little did I know that their work was about to reach Warp 9, which is a mixed metaphor of sorts. I'll let them tell the story. Philip is a founding member of the Experimental Cosmology Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Travis Brashears just finished his first year as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, but when we first met, he was still a high school student working with Philip. Now, these two pioneers are working together on a plan to send probes to Alpha Centauri and beyond. You'll hear them mention the Breakthrough Initiative created by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner.

For more about that staggering effort, check out our episodes for August 4th and 11th last year. Philip Travis, it is such a pleasure to get you back on the show. I don't know if you remember, it's not that long ago, it's only been a little bit more than a year, since we first met in a cafeteria in Italy at the Planetary Defense Conference, and that's where this started. Yeah, I actually do remember that. I believe I had lima beans, one of my great loves in life in addition to steel-cut oats. Yes, I remember that very much.

You know, frighteningly, I think you're right. I think I do remember you having lima beans. It's pretty bad. It's probably what extraterrestrials eat anyway. Yeah, a lot has happened since that time in, what was it, April of 2015? Yes. Okay, April 2015. Yeah, Travis and I were both at the Planetary Defense Conference, and it was a great pleasure to meet you. We had some wonderful conversations there. But you're right, an enormous amount has happened with our work, both technically, politically, and even economically. I would not have imagined a year later, which is probably just about 12 months later,

that things would change so dramatically. I would not have either. And I feel like I got in on the ground floor here. Travis, you have moved on. I hear you're now at UC Berkeley. Yeah, I go to school at Berkeley and study engineering physics, and I'm also pre-business. All right, good. You'll be an interstellar entrepreneur with that background. Yeah, exactly. We'll be paving the new companies to the interstellar travel frontier.

Move over, Elon. Yeah, watch out. Mars is not enough. We've got to get some background, because not everybody is going to be familiar with this. Philip, give us the thumbnail description of what you have proposed for getting not humanity but our presence out to the stars. At the 2015 PDC conference, the Planetary Defense Conference, where the three of us were, planetary defense conference where we three of us were our focus in the talks was on the uses of directed energy for defending the planet against asteroids other things comets included but when we started this program in 2009 looking at scaling up of plant of directed energy systems initially for planetary defense essentially Essentially from the very beginning,

certainly within a few days of when I started working on this, I started writing down other applications of the same system. And one of those applications was achieving extraordinarily high speeds with spacecraft. And so that was sort of the genesis of this whole idea, which is, as you said, sort of taken off in the realm of, you know, we now have, looks like a realistic approach to getting things to interstellar distances. And that was really came out of that work, essentially from the very, very beginning,

just that we had to find some home for it. We proposed to NASA several times and finally in 2015 they funded our phase one NIAC program with the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts to explore the uses of directed energy combined with a wafer scale spacecraft to achieve relativistic speeds which would then enable interstellar travel within a human lifetime in the sense that we would get to the target in significantly less than a human lifetime. And that was sort of our goal, is make it not thousand-year missions, which people have talked about in terms of world ships where you send people, but we wanted to talk about what could be done

today in reality, not with some hypothetical warp drive or wormhole or things that don't exist, but rather with things that do exist and being applied in intelligent ways while being hard is feasible. And so that's basically the combination. You use directed energy in the form of a laser array to use the momentum in the photons to push on a reflector, which then drives the spacecraft at incredibly high speeds. We don't have the same kind of problems you have in ordinary rockets, where you carry the fuel with you because there is no fuel to carry. You simply illuminate the spacecraft from afar and then you shoot it out, more or less like an artillery piece or a gun, and it then glides at extremely high speed after

being accelerated for only a couple of minutes and then arrives at its target, in our case, the nearest targets, four and a half light years is Alpha Centauri. There are many other targets within a few tens of light years which are feasible. It arrives at the nearest targets in about 20 to 40 years. So we finally have a path forward. I think that's what's very different than the previous many generations of talks about interstellar flight, which always involved things which were not really feasible. We're trying to make it feasible. You talk about a wafer. Of course, being from the Planetary Society, I like to think of it as a sail. But what are we actually talking about here? How big would these wafers be, these tiny spacecraft?

Spacecraft do not have to be wafers. We've focused in the NASA program on a very small spacecraft because a second part of the program, in addition to producing these extraordinarily large laser arrays, which are the key to success in the whole program, whether a space-based or ground-based laser array, the key is to build large, not just high power, but large in aperture phased arrays. So that's key one. Key two is to produce spacecraft that are of low mass because the lower the mass of the spacecraft,

the faster it goes for a given power and size of array. So we focused on producing spacecraft at the wafer scale levels, so literally things that are 10, 20, 30 centimeters in diameter and very thin, which sounds somewhat preposterous to people who are used to thinking of the Voyager spacecraft or the Curiosity rover or any of the common spacecraft, which are very heavy and have all kinds of sophisticated things on board that can be used for digging holes or taking pictures. But our spacecraft is, one of the designs of the spacecraft is to simply fly by a target,

take pictures, measure radiation fields, measure magnetic fields, do spectroscopy on the target. And you can reduce all of that, including the laser communication system, the onboard power systems. You can reduce that to a wafer. And that's sort of the second thrust of this research. And then the third one is the reflector. So in addition to the laser array and the spacecraft you're sending out, which can be a wafer size, but it could also be a CubeSat, just keep that in mind. Or it could be a 100-kilogram Voyager-class spacecraft, or it could be a shuttle-class spacecraft, but larger mass is slower. So to realistically get to the stars with the kinds of system we're talking about, you

want to keep it very small, preferably well under one kilogram. The wafers actually are about one gram. The reflector, on the other hand, is not very large for the small spacecraft case. In the wafer scale case, the sail is of order a meter. So you're not talking about a very large, and you're certainly not talking about something that's very massive. It's very tiny. You could easily hold it in your hand.

And that becomes a very different kind of mission to the, say, Project Daedalus or, you know, Orion or any of the projects people talked about in the past for achieving high speeds both inside the solar system and out. It's totally different than what people normally think about in terms of solar sailing missions. what people normally think about in terms of solar sailing missions. In solar sailing missions, you want very large reflectors that are very low mass. So at least the low mass is similar. But you want very, very large reflectors. For laser-driven devices, spacecraft, you want very small sails. It's completely opposite.

And it's not obvious until you go through the mathematics that you actually go faster by having smaller sails it's completely opposite and it's not obvious until you go through the mathematics that you actually go faster by having smaller sails the the optimum point which we show in our paper called a roadmap to interstellar flight is when the mass of the sail equals the mass of the bear spacecraft that's when you achieve the maximum speed so for a wafer scale spacecraft the sail is only on the order of a meter or so. It's a human size. So it's very, very different than what you may be thinking of in terms of, say, a solar sail,

the kind that you're working on at the Planetary Society. It's vastly different, and it's counterintuitive. People keep saying, make the sail bigger, make it bigger, make it bigger, and I keep telling them, no, if you make it bigger, go slower. It's counterintuitive. We will put a link up, by the way, to that paper, A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight, along with some other terrific links on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio.

One of the links I'm going to put up there is to this terrific Time Magazine video interview that both of you appear in. Travis, you kind of get the last word in that video. You talk about what we opened with, sort of this increasing acceptance of the possibility of this that you've started to see. Yeah, yes. It's definitely opened up a wide array of missions, as Phil was explaining. You really could go from just exploring our solar system or going interstellar and that's really where we've gotten a lot of traction is the interstellar case but there's a lot of missions along that roadmap that we will also be able to

do and it just it opens up a lot of profoundly interesting means to explore the universe that's what we hope to gain out of this and what I mentioned in the time video at the very end was, at first we started off with a lot of critics, which was very true. We would get, people would really like, in conferences and talks, we'd kind of get funny looks, like they're proposing a kilometer-class laser array, like these guys are a bit insane. But as we've gained a lot of traction through our NASA NIAC and now the Breakthrough Starshot program, it's become a lot more feasible and people have come to realize that this is the future and this is where we have to go.

I want to hear more about the laser array that would be needed to do this. You've started to build a prototype, right, on a small scale? Yeah, we have in the lab, we have small scale demos. And of course, people have been using directed energy for a wide variety of purposes in different ways for many years, although not of the kind that we're speaking of. But, you know, they're an analogy in everyday life. Many of the clothes that you're wearing right now, some of them are probably cut with a laser with directed energy or your smart device has pieces that are cut with lasers you know lasers used for medicine and you know many different purposes now those are in general not phased arrays of the kind that we're talking about

phased arrays have been built in the laboratory, and there are a variety of uses, some in the DOD community as well as in the scientific community for laser comm and other purposes that are being explored. But it's a very new technology and one which is only now coming into sort of its own, if you will. And what's happened is the advances in the photonics industry, driven largely by telecommunications and other applications, medical, etc., have now pushed this technology to the point where we can begin to apply it in ways which are highly non-traditional.

So what we're looking at and have since really day one, it really hasn't changed, the basic scenario, if you go back to our early papers, it's almost exactly the same, is to use what's called a MOPA design, M-O-P-A, which is a master oscillator power amplifier array. It's very much like a radar phased array system, which is becoming increasingly common in radar systems on ships, and eventually it'll be used at airports, that allows you to electronically steer the beam with a relatively flat panel of radar emitters that are phased and then controlled so that you can orient the beam. The analogy in radio astronomy that some of your viewers or listeners I'm sure are familiar with is something like the VLA.

The very large array out there in New Mexico, right, or ALMA in Chile. Right, ALMA in Chile, or VLBI, where people do very long baseline interferometry. If you look at the Event Horizon Telescope, another example of doing phasing over large distances. But for us, we're not operating at radio wavelengths or millimeter wavelengths. We're operating at, in the near infrared, about one micron. And in order to get to the speeds that we need to, we need to operate at high power, around tens to hundred gigawatt range, which, you know, around tens to 100 gigawatt range, which, you know, sounds like a lot. Indeed, it is.

And we need to have large baselines of order of kilometers to 10 kilometers, which in the radio community, of course, is small. But we need to have a densely packed array, which is completely different than most of the radio applications, which are what are called very sparse arrays. So our emitters, or if you want to think of them as telescopes, are jammed right next to each other. And you need that in order to get high efficiency of the power that you emit onto the reflector in order to optimize the speed. So it looks very, very different than a conventional array that you may be thinking

about. It certainly looks very different than something like the Keck telescope or, you know, the upcoming 30-meter class telescopes. Once you master that technology, once you master the ability to build large format phased laser arrays, you open up a whole slew of possibilities, one of which happens to be interstellar flight. It's not the only one, but it is one of. And so the real enabling hammer, if you will, is the laser-phased array. You talked about this reaching maybe 0.1 C,

one-tenth of the speed of light, to be able to get us out to where we want to go. And reaching Alpha Centauri, therefore, in, what'd you say, I think like 40 years, if we use the same technology to push a wafer spacecraft out to Jupiter, how long would that take to do what Cassini took years to do? If you're going at 10% the speed of light, which means that you're going at, you know, 30,000 kilometers per second, rather than 300,000 kilometers per second is the speed of light. So 10% of the speed of light is 30,000 kilometers per second. Let's just do some simple math in our head.

It takes about eight minutes for light to go from the sun to the Earth. It takes approximately the same time for light to travel from the Earth to Mars, depending on where Mars is in its orbit relative to the Earth. At the speed of light, it would only take a spacecraft on our clock to Mars depending on where Mars is in its orbit relative to the Earth. At the speed of light, it would only take a spacecraft on our clock on the Earth, it would only take it eight minutes to get from the Earth to Mars. However at 10% of the speed of light, it would take eight times 10 or 80 minutes to get to Mars.

So you know about roughly an hour and a half to get to Mars. We were talking about spacecraft which are actually going even faster than 10%. Our goal is greater than 20%. In our NASA program, it's about 25%. But there's no upper limit except the speed of light, which is very, very different than conventional rocketry where the speed limits are largely set by the exhaust velocities of the chemical propellants or even the ion engines. In our case, the exhaust velocity is the speed of light.

And so that's our limit is the speed of light for many reasons. But if you want to go from here to Mars at 10% speed, you're talking an hour and a half. If you want to go out to Jupiter, you'd be talking a number of hours. But it's not anything like the kinds of timescales that are required with chemical propellants. And of course, these spacecraft can be quite small, and you can shoot them out one after the other. So just to give you an example, the small spacecraft that we're talking about only take about two to three minutes to accelerate up to 20% the speed of light, and then it's gone. It's running ballistically at that point. It has some guidance on board in the form of photon thrusters, but you don't leave the laser on the entire time.

There's definitely a public misconception about this. We don't leave the laser on the entire way to Alpha Centauri or the entire way to any place. We just shoot it out like you shoot an artillery piece. You then don't wait until the data comes back to shoot out the next one. You shoot it out five minutes later and just keep launching them one after the other. So you're talking about sending out

potentially an armada of spacecraft, many hundreds per day conceivably if you have the power to do so in terms of electrical power, because these systems are electrically driven lasers. There's no expendables. They're all solid state. You know, there's no chemicals. It's not like, say, the ABL program, which is a chemical-based laser. This is an electrically driven laser system. In fact, it's not one gigantic laser in the normal sense. It's a series of small laser amplifiers. There's really only one laser in the system.

It's a very tiny seed laser that is the master oscillator that then feeds all the amplifiers. It's much like the parallel processing in a supercomputer, which essentially all supercomputers today are not a gigantic single-core supercomputer. They are a large number, hundreds of thousands, pushing a million just regular i7s, AMD devices like you have in your laptop or in your desktop. So that's parallel processing to make a supercomputer.

Well, we're parallel processing and synchronizing laser amplifiers that are very, very small. They fit in your hand. And each one's about roughly a kilowatt, which is not that large for a laser these days. And then you gang them all together and synchronize them and put them into a phased array. So it's the equivalent of a supercomputer. You could call it a super laser

if you want. It's not the language we use, but it's the sort of analog of a supercomputer. In the aggregate, though, still talking about a lot of power. Are we talking about, ideally, this array being in space and depending on the sun? You can place it really any place you want with a, you know, variety of issues associated with where you place it. So in our roadmap, we talk about beginning the program in the laboratory. So the first ones get, you know, they're on your desktop. And then you build them, you know, larger and larger until you kind of outgrow the laboratory. And then you have to go, you know, larger and larger until you kind of outgrow the laboratory and then you have to go, you know, to a bigger laboratory or a high bay and then you go outside

and start testing. Then you take them up to a mountain and, you know, build larger ones and test them. In the paper, we discussed two logical scenarios. First, you start on the ground and see how well you can do. How well can you overcome the atmospheric turbulence and perturbations? How well can you do adaptive optics like you know we now commonly do in astronomy and if that works on the ground terrific you know and then we will build it on the ground breakthrough star shot program is a ground-based laser array that we will deploy at high altitude and use the system which is inherently an adaptive optic system by its very nature. It will literally have tens of millions, potentially, of adaptive optic sub-elements,

every sub-element being a laser amplifier. So it's an amazing adaptive optic system in that sense. We believe that we can make that work successfully. The NASA program is largely focused on space-based lasers. The space offers a number of advantages over ground, not just the lack of atmosphere, but the much greater availability of targeting and the possibility of running it more continuously than you would on the ground. So there's trade-offs, but clearly for economic reasons, you start on the ground and see how well you can do and then build out.

Another ideal place in space in addition to an orbital system would be one on the moon. So on the moon you don't have any significant atmosphere. You do have a little bit of dust debris that you have to worry about. But the backside of the moon might be a very nice place to put this. We don't worry about anyone turning around and pointing at the Earth. And you still have, you know, a nice environment without a nanosphere. But it's a cost. It's largely an economics issue. It's much easier to build something on the ground.

You go out and kick it, you know, and change something, go and fiddle with it. You know, if you want to put something on the moon, you have to have an entire infrastructure on the moon. You want to put something in orbit, you have to learn how to build large structures in space. You know, it's just a reality-based tradeoff of, you know, cost versus benefit. And that's how we look at the entire program. We're trying to keep this on the real axis.

You know, there's no miracle required here. There's no imaginary technology. We try to keep it all real technology all things which are many of the things are scaling exponentially much like they do in the electronics world so that things get much better and much cheaper as time goes on and that's precisely the case in photonics and in our paper you'll see a plot of the performance as a function of time and the cost decrease as a function of time. And they both behave with a beautiful exponential curve, much like the so-called Moore's law curve. In fact, it has almost identical time scale where the doubling time increase in performance and the

lowering of cost by a factor of two, both being about 18 months in photonics and about 18 to 24 months in electronics. There's no reason those should be the same, but they are. That's part of the key to the future, is to reduce the price to the point where we can afford to do this. Let's talk about the third leg of that work that you mentioned, the reflector, because I would like to hear how, with this kind of energy, how do you keep this from immediately ionizing your spacecraft before it has a chance to accelerate to the stars? Well, this is covered in gory detail in the paper, but let me give you some examples just to help people feel a little more comfortable about this.

You know, 100 gigawatts to anybody, including me, sounds like an enormous amount of power to put on anything. And clearly, you wouldn't want to get a suntan and 100 gigawatts of power placed on your body. So it wouldn't be a good day for you. you. On the other hand, in your everyday life, and probably on this call, almost certainly on this call, is a fiber optic transmitting data from one place to another, you know, for this Skype call. That fiber optic generally will have an amplifier with it to boost the signal level over long distances. Those amplifiers are not dissimilar to the type of laser amplifiers that we'll be using. They're at a different wavelength and the materials are different. We're using yturbium. They use erbium. But the issues are somewhat similar. So I'll give you a simple example. This call is going over a single mode fiber almost certainly somewhere in the link. If I place one watt on a single mode fiber which is not a very large

Laser at all at the output of that fiber I will get 10 gigawatts per square meter at the output of that fiber that fiber does not burn up And indeed you can take that same kind of fiber slight very slightly different but not too much and put kind of fiber, very slightly different, but not too much, and put 1,000 watts through it, or actually even the record now has been about 30 kilowatts. But at 1,000 watts through a single mode fiber, you're talking about 10 terawatts per square meter. That's vastly more than we are talking about, and that does not burn up. so one can already produce materials in the form of simple glasses that are suitably prepared which have extraordinarily low absorption and if

properly treated can have decent reflectivity but the key and this confuses a lot of people, the key is not necessarily to reflect 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 absorption. And that's what already exists in the fiber optic world, namely ultra low absorption. So that's one of the keys, which is discussed in our paper, is that for the high flux sails, which is the case for the smaller spacecraft has smaller sails. And since you have the same amount of power, they have higher flux, namely watts per square meter. So they are the more difficult sails to produce. The larger mass spacecraft, such as a kilogram CubeSat or, you know, 100 kilogram Voyager class spacecraft, those sails are much larger. And since you have the same amount of power, the power spread out over much larger areas, they have much less flux. So they have much less in requirements in terms of worrying about them

burning up. And, you know, if anyone wants to go online, we have an online calculator on our UCSB website. You can just go in and design your own mission. It'll tell you the flux on the target. It'll even calculate the temperature of the sail for you. Just put in all kinds of parameters and, you know, have a great day. If you want to read the paper, it'll even put you to sleep at night. I mean, it's just terrific. I do want to read the paper, it'll even put you to sleep at nine. It's just terrific.

I do want to recommend that calculator. It's quite comprehensive, and I played with it a little bit. There were some variables that I wasn't even sure what I was inputting, but it is a fascinating little toy that you have put online for all of us. You mentioned, of course, that you're talking about flyby missions, pretty fast flyby missions. I want to talk about how we're going to get data back from there. But first, has there been any thought about how you might be able to decelerate and hang around that target at Alpha Centauri or wherever? I know this is something that with much larger spacecraft, people like Robert Forward and Dyson used to talk about. But it sounds like you're saying, no, we'll just pass through.

So I did a little paper on this wafer sat as well. And we looked at slowing down when we get to Alcentauri. And there really is no way to slow down feasibly that we see right now a one-gram spacecraft that's moving at 20%, 30% the speed of light. People have looked at various methods, whether you try to do an orbital slowdown where you try to use the Alpha Centauri suns to slow down, but even that would require way too close of a... You'd have to be going much slower than 20% the speed of light to actually use those to slow you down.

People have also looked at mag sails to slow down. That's a magnetic, so it would use the magnetic field of, what, the star to resistance there to slow you down somewhat? Actually, this is the interstellar plasma. Yeah, it is the interstellar plasma, yeah. Not the magnetic field of the star. That we looked at, but having that on board our spacecraft would obviously increase the mass and then therefore slow us down. Even using that, you'd have to be going a lot slower than what

we're talking about. So really there's no conceivably feasible way for us to slow down if we are trying to get to the closest stars with a small spacecraft. Okay, so we're left with a flyby. That's fine. But after that flyby, this little spacecraft, this wafer, has to get some data back to Earth. Philip, you surprised me with how relatively easy that's going to be, even at a distance of many light years. Yeah, well, I don't usually use the term easy. Easy, yeah, I'm sorry, I went too far. I just don't have that in my vocabulary for most of the stuff that we do.

Well, easier than I would have expected. Yeah, it's going to be hard. It's going to be hard. But another gory section, which will put almost everybody to sleep, is calculating the signal-to-noise ratios or the link margins, as it's sometimes known as, for data links.

Using a radio link from the spacecraft back to Earth really is a non-starter. It's just the gain is way, way too low on the spacecraft. It's just not feasible. We threw that out immediately. It doesn't work. Then you're left with a laser communication system, and we solve that mathematically.

You look at both the signal level you get at the Earth and the number of photons per square meter per second, as well as the backgrounds. I don't want to bore you with at the Earth, the number of photons per square meter per second, as well as the backgrounds. I don't want to bore you with all the details, knock yourself out in the paper. The key is the laser array which you use to propel the spacecraft is reversible in that it is a bidirectional system. So the same laser array that you use to transmit can be used as a phased array telescope, namely that you can use it as a receiver. The exact same array, you don't really

change anything except you remove the laser amplifiers. And that's the key. That gives you large surface area back at the Earth or on the moon or in orbit or wherever you're at, which then allows you to receive the photons back from the spacecraft. That combined with the very narrow bandwidth of the onboard laser means that you can greatly reduce the backgrounds. Otherwise, it becomes essentially hopeless. telescope or a 30-meter class telescope that we hope to build within the next decade or so, those are not useful for this kind of laser communication system. Oh, I think the important point here is that we have found a feasible path forward, yet not easy. But whereas slowing down, we have still not found a feasible path forward. So that's the difference here. It's not easy,

but it's feasible. And so we can actually see a path forward, which is a really important point. Incredibly impressive. What kind of transmitter power would be needed on the wafer to be able to make this work from, say, Alpha Centauri? On board, we've looked at using like a one watt burst for laser communication on board the spacecraft to achieve data rates back to the kilometer scale array back at Earth or around Earth or at the moon. The mission, if you think about it, you start out from the Earth, you blast things out literally. They're going out at tens of thousands of Gs in acceleration. It's just amazing.

More Gs than a typical artillery shell at launch. You might think electronics fall apart at that point, but they don't. And there's already electronics on munitions, so that's doable. The sail is another issue. That's a real concern. Once you are far away from the sun, you don't have the sun to provide power through photovoltaics any longer. So on board the spacecraft is a small RTG, a radiothermal generator. Oh my gosh.

A very tiny RTG. Incredibly tiny. Yeah, very tiny. Less than like in the milligrams. But then once we get to like our target, say Alpha Centauri, we'd have PV or solar panel on board to power up the spacecraft once it gets there. So we can have actually higher than one watt burst data rates back to the star system. But on board this tiny grain of plutonium to get you

to the stars. Yeah, exactly. Correct. Right. So that provides power during the cruise phase when you're outside the solar system and you're not yet at the targets. You don't have any significant sunlight or starlight to fire up your photovoltaics. But it provides enough power to keep things alive. And once in a while, you store energy on board the spacecraft and thin film capacitors and some other things that we're working on. And then you burst back a little bit of data to the Earth. And then you use the photon thrusters on board

to point back at the Earth. And there's star trackers and all kinds of stuff on board. You just assure yourself that your spacecraft is still alive. It's like calling home. But you don't do that very often. It's when you are in the encounter phase that you have more power. And then the photovoltaics give you a much greater source of power. Actually, in the paper, we discuss this whole thing in gory detail and look at two modes.

The basic mode is that there is no photovoltaics, that we simply use the onboard power source in the RTG. The baseline data communication system uses that. Even a small amount of PV onboard, even on, let's say, the backside of the wafer, gives you orders of magnitude more power than the RTG. So the one-watt burst is assuming using nothing but the RTG on board with data, with energy storage that we burst back. But once the photovoltaics fire up, then you have many, many watts.

And if you put photovoltaics on the sail, then you can have, you know, hundreds of watts potentially available. And so we have some options, you know, since this is a long-term program, this is not something that we're going to build, you know, five years from now or 10 years from now that we're going to build prototypes now and work out a lot of the R&D. You know, we're looking at a 20, 30 yearyear program, so there's a lot of technology which will get developed and just be better for us. But what we're looking at is using existing technology and already works on paper for existing technology. Imagine what will happen in 20, 30 years from now when we have, you know, some incredibly new technology, which we already see the seeds of, you know, coming down the line. And so this is going to just look better and better as time goes on. Yeah, Moore's Law is a wonderful thing.

Back to the reversibility of the array itself. Rather than just detecting photons, could it be used for creating images as well? And you can see where I'm going here. One of the things that we point out in the paper is that you can use the same technology as a path forward to kilometer or greater optical telescopes, which we don't really have a good path forward currently with existing technologies. It becomes extraordinarily difficult to build very large conventional optical systems. Even segmented optics becomes a real nightmare in terms of the mechanical systems

required. This system is electronically steered and it doesn't have to be in the shape of an ordinary telescope. It can be flat, it can be wavy. As long as you know where things are, you can use that same mode of having a phased array telescope as an imaging device. Now, it's not the same as having a one kilometer round mirror or segmented mirror. So it's not exactly the same. So it has certain limitations that we're going to have to apply this to particular areas of astronomy where we really need large aperture area, but it is essentially a large telescope that you can raster scan the image, do spectroscopy on images, which is probably will find its main applications in the beginning, but is a path forward to extraordinarily large telescopes, and that offers a revolutionary advancement potentially in astronomy.

Let's go back into flashlight mode with that array. It will be, by far, the biggest flashlight humanity has ever created. How about using it to say hello across the universe? SETI. Well, as you know, there's some controversy in the SETI community about listening versus talking. This is, I think, more of a religious discussion than it is a scientific discussion. As I point out to many of my colleagues, because we're already transmitting, in fact, this show is likely being transmitted or will soon be transmitted. And when we talk to each other on our cell phones, you know, every time we turn on a radar system at

an airport or every time we turn on an adaptive optics laser at a telescope, or any time we have laser comm from Earth to space, or from Earth to drone, or you name it, you know, we're transmitting television, radio, etc. There's no question that the Earth is transmitting, has been doing so for, you know, about 100 years. But this provides a very unique opportunity given the amount of power and the small angular divergence so that the power per unit solid angle, the watts per steradian, become a key metric in detectability.

So there is another paper that we wrote, which is on the archives and on our website, called The Search for Directed Intelligence, which is on the archives and on our website, called The Search for Directed Intelligence, which basically turns the problem around and says, asks the question, given our technological abilities to build the kind of laser rays we're talking about now for interstellar and for planetary defense, what are the consequences of that for being seen by other civilizations? But more importantly, what is the consequence of another civilization being at the same technological readiness level that we are

at now and about to embark on? What does that mean for us being able to detect them? So hopefully, and the SETI community would be out of business if this weren't the case, hopefully other civilizations are not as skittish as we are about transmitting. Hopefully they are sending out information. Otherwise the SETI community should just pack it up and go home. But the consequences as discussed in the paper are really quite profound. If there were a single civilization like ours will soon be in the NASA program or the Breakthrough program,

and if they had the same kind of laser ray that we're embarking on building, if there's a single civilization anywhere in our galaxy, and they adopted a very simple strategy of just pointing their laser ray at stars, which is where we think life has a higher probability of being near in terms of planets being associated with stars, then we could detect that single civilization anywhere in our galaxy with a very tiny, and I mean tiny, like a 10 centimeter class telescope that's suitably arrayed. Wow. And that's a very profound statement with a few-year survey.

So it's all covered in this paper, A Search for Directed Intelligence. And we can detect extragalactic civilizations. We can detect a single civilization in Andromeda, which we believe there are approximately one trillion stars, and therefore of order, hundreds of billions,

maybe trillion planets in andromeda we can detect that with a simple less than one meter telescope on the earth inside the earth's atmosphere uh in in a few years again a single civilization in andromeda and then if you go out from there that the paper discusses detecting life across the entire universe. The signal is so bright that you can literally be seen across the entire horizon out to easily redshift 10. Pretty far. I mean, that's incredibly early. And we don't think that there's, in our sense of what it takes to form life, we don't think that life forms at redshift 10. And the paper actually discusses the high redshift case as well and gives you lots of

plots of, you know, how old you are versus redshift. But you can kind of look at it. And I think redshift one and a half is a reasonable point to say, if it's life like on earth and it took as long as we took to develop, then, you, then that's a reasonable redshift to target. But at redshift one and a half, you have a phenomenal number of galaxies. So let's just do the math really quickly. In our galaxy alone, there's of order 100 billion stars, and we now believe that there's roughly one planet per star, roughly. And in the universe, there is roughly 100 billion galaxies. So we think that

the number of planets in the universe is of the order of a billion trillion planets in the universe. So it brings up a really interesting, both scientific and philosophical point. If they're out there, and they are at least as advanced as we are, or presumably more so, why don't we see them? As Enrico Fermi said, where is everybody? Where is, yeah. So either they don't exist or they're not at an advanced enough level or we're not looking in the right band or they're using different means of communication

or maybe we're in the forbidden zone. Do not contact because this species of life is dangerous and crazy. That's the prime directive, you know. Yeah, we don't have anything to do with those people or those life forms. I don't know, and I'm not a SETI person. I just wrote one SETI paper my entire life, and I may stop there. But the paper has really profound consequences as to detectability. And the one thing I really like about the paper, not just that I wrote it,

but this whole idea that you can set up a very simple ground-based survey and kind of answer the question of, is there a single advanced civilization anywhere in our galaxy that's transmitting in a band that we can see in our ground-based survey, which is quite a broad band optically? Yes or no. And of course, if it's no, it could be fine. They're transmitting somewhere else or they don't exist. But this technology that we're talking about has truly radical and transformative consequences, one of which is signaling.

But of course, signaling only happens at the speed of light. So if we were to shine a beam out today to Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, it would take some two and a half million years to get there. Well, that's not very exciting. Even if we send it out to the Kepler planets, which are typically a thousand light years away, it would take a thousand years for light to get there.

So it makes much more sense to look at other possibilities rather than try to send to those other possibilities in my mind. But still, I think there's a bit of an illogical and irrational debate going on in the scientific community about transmitting because clearly we transmit every day. in the scientific community about transmitting, because clearly we transmit every day. And anyone who is supportive of our project to build a 100 gigawatt laser array must surely realize that that beam is not going to just stay on the spacecraft going out. It's going to spill over into the universe.

So if you don't want to transmit, you better shut us down immediately, as well as shut down your cell phone and shut down all laser comm and all adaptive optics, lasers, et cetera. This is an area where I definitely have some discussion with people. But we're abiding by the point of not transmitting it at this point. I'm willing to settle for our immediate stellar neighborhood.

I think that's just fine. Travis, do you want to get in on this, even just about how mind-boggling it is? It's really mind-boggling it is? It's really mind-boggling, and I think the best analogy that I can kind of think for what we're talking about is basically instead of how we've normally done SETI, where we look at kind of the entire universe, rather, let's look at specific targets with our system. So you kind of imagine our world or our globe, and instead of looking at like all the ocean and all the land, you just pick out certain bits of the land to look at and analyze and see, okay, are we getting a signal from this specific location? I think it's a much better and easier way to do SETI than what we've recently done. So I think that's the best analogy Phil has talked about with me, and I really think it's profoundly interesting.

Before we wrap up here, you need to talk about Breakthrough Starshot. We've talked a little bit about NASA's support for the work that you're doing. And, of course, Breakthrough Initiative has come up. We talked about it just last year on this program with Andrew, and how it is the SETI portion, the listening for whoever may be out there. But there is now this third element of Breakthrough Starshot, in addition to listening and getting the word out to the public, where they're providing you with some support. This is pretty amazing, isn't it?

I mean, I've had several people talk to me about Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire who's behind this, and tell me, no, no, he's not a crackpot. This guy is the real thing. He knows what he's doing, and he is certainly passionate about all this. This story was really an interesting story. First of all, Yuri I find to be just truly brilliant and interesting as a person to talk to. We have just a great time talking about things.

But the story behind this is really one of those coincidences in life. We wrote a proposal to NASA in 2013 and finally wrote the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. I had given a talk at the SETI Institute in February 2014 on planetary defense, using the kind of technology that we're talking about now for interstellar, and mentioned that one of the applications, in addition to planetary defense and SETI was relativistic transport. I was told that meeting I should talk to Pete Warden, who was the head of NASA Ames. The SETI Institute is near the NASA Ames facility. He was not at that meeting and we actually did not run into each other until October 31st of 2015 at the 100-Year Starship Conference in Santa Clara. He was walking out the door.

I was just about to give a talk. He had to rush off to a meeting. I just gave him a quick rundown of our NASA program, which he was not familiar with. He said, sounds very interesting. Please send me whatever you have. And then he had to run out the door. So I didn't realize at the time he had actually stepped down from NASA Ames as director and taken up the directorship of the Breakthrough Foundation. So I sent him the paper in a couple of days later, and he calls me back probably two weeks later and said, oh, really interesting. And first credible thing I've seen on, you know,

interstellar flight. And he asked for a meeting and it turned out that we were both in San Francisco, him returning from Japan and me at an NSF meeting in December. And we got together at their headquarters, which is on the NASA Ames Moffett facility. I ran down, you know, all the specifics of the program. This is the paper, Roadmap to Interstellar Flight, which was by then some 60 pages long. And he asked if he could send it out to some friends of his. I didn't know who those friends were, but I said, of course, send it to anybody you want.

And, you know, please try to get critical people because I would like to get some feedback. So a few weeks later, another call back basically said, look, my friend would like to, you know, meet with you. I don't remember the exact language. It was something like that. You know, can you come out for a meeting? And I said, okay, sure. Well, his friend happened to be Uri Milner. So this, there was a lot of stuff I didn't know, obviously, at the time. So there was a meeting called at Yuri's place in Silicon Valley. Yuri was just delightful.

He walks into the meeting with my paper in his hand with a bunch of notes and just starts peppering me with all kinds of technical questions. So clearly this is an individual who's not only an incredible entrepreneur in terms of making money and investing in very great companies like Facebook and many others. But, you know, clearly this is a scientist who actually... He's a trained physicist, right? Yeah, yeah. His training was as a physicist.

So he actually has a background in mathematics and physics and he asks just great questions. I mean, really, the type of questions I love. What about this? What about that? Is this going to be a deal breaker? He would sometimes say, what are the deal breakers? What are the things that prevent it? And he's absolutely delightful. I just loved talking to him at that point.

So that was early January. So we had a series of meetings subsequent to that. They formed an advisory panel. He said to me very clearly, you know, I want to send this out to other people to get them to vet it, just to make sure there's no major mistakes. He explained that his dream from being very young was to go to the stars, but he didn't have a way to do it. And now he saw a path forward with our work. You know, he made it clear that if this were to be vetted positively, that he would be willing to invest in it, in intellectual as well as be able to put some

resources towards it. An advisory board was formed, eventually brought in some additional dozen plus people. And now it's sort of accreted, you know, a fair amount. And then I think it was late March, we had a go, no-go meeting at his place. And no one could find any significant objections, you know, to why we couldn't do it. Uri was very, very wise in saying that the ground-based option was really the only one that was affordable. And he's correct. That was really the only affordable option in the short term. So he wanted to focus on that and keep the array as reasonably small as possible to be consistent with the task at hand.

But he was just so passionate about getting to the stars. It's just a joy to interact with a person like that. And he said finally okay i can't see a problem and um you know we're gonna i'm willing to invest 100 million dollars in the research and development program which he said he wanted to announce on april 12th which i didn't know what the significance of april 12th was but he explained it to me his name yuri's night right was he's you know his name is yuri he's named named after Yuri Gagarin, which is the first person to leave the Earth, April 12, 1961. So that was the 50-50 anniversary at the announcement in New York on April 12, 2016.

That's how that program went. It all came out of the NASA program. So we have to make sure that we properly credit NASA. He's just a really brilliant guy. I really love working with the team. As is Pete Ward, and Pete Ward is delightful. He's so non-traditional, out-of-the-box kind of person, just a great, great guy to work with,

as is the rest of the team. Anne is on that. Anne's on that. Anne Druyan, yeah. Right. May Jemison. You know, a number of really just very bright, as well as a number of extremely technical people, you know, Freeman Dyson, people, you know, who've thought about these things in the past.

And then a number of technologists in addition, Avi Loeb, very bright theoretical physicist, friend of mine from cosmology of over decades so we have a really great team it's it's really exciting time we just got our about a month after the nasa and sorry out of a month after the breakthrough announcement we received our nasa phase two award so we're now in the second phase of the nasa program and nasa has been extraordinarily i would say brave is the right word because you know some things in nasa just have a kind of funny feel to them, and obviously SETI was one of them, and so they had to eventually get rid of that. Going interstellar always has this kind of weird vibe, I think, at NASA, because it has to be credible.

And in the reviews of our proposal in 2014, they eventually came back and said this was, you know, sort of the most futuristic, as I think they said, science fiction-y proposal that they had seen that was credible. And indeed, the credibility was the key point. So NASA's now gone on a limb, you know, and been unbelievably supportive of what we're doing. And then not too long after that, Representative John Culberson, who heads the NASA Appropriations Committee.

Representative from Texas. He's been on this show. I've never met him, and I did not speak to him or encourage him to put anything in his bill. I mean, obviously, I influenced him because he quotes our work in this bill, but he calls on NASA to begin a study. There's no, it's not a program start, but he directs NASA to study the feasibility of going faster than 10% the speed of light to the nearest stars. And I think he mentions Alpha Centauri in the bill. to the nearest stars, and I think he mentions Alpha Centauri in the bill. He mentions our work by name as an example of a NASA program that's being funded that shows a path forward and would like it to coincide with the 100th anniversary

of the lunar landing, so that would be 2069 know, either launch or flyby. It's worded flexibly. You know, that's amazing for me to read that. I had no idea that that was going on. But, you know, clearly it's both the NASA events, the breakthrough events, it's all sort of coming together and behind the scenes. And then, you know, we have the congressional level now involved. So it's been an amazing year.

I'll say. Since we met you, I would never in my wildest imaginations have imagined that a little over 12 months later, literally it was 12 months later almost to the day that Yuri Milner announced $100 million support. Actually, it was probably just slightly after we met NASA supported the program or it might have been at that time yeah it's been amazing here. Travis you've been around for a lot of this? Yeah I so while I was at Berkeley Phil and I kept in contact and we would like brainstorm together and just kind of stay in touch and then I came back for my summer and yeah we've really been pushing hard on all these fronts and it's been a lot of fun. 2069. I don't know about for Philip and me, at least me, you've got a shot.

Yeah. Do you think this is something you're going to stick with? Yeah, definitely. It's something I've already seen as my future, and Phil and I will definitely do anything possible that we see to get it there. When you filled out your application for UC Berkeley and it, you know, asked for hobbies, did you put down fostering interstellar travel? Yeah, I definitely did. And I don't know how the reviewers took it, but I definitely did. And they probably thought I was kind of crazy at first, but they let me in. Where do the two of you hope that we will be

with all of this in 10 to 20 years? I think one very important part of this that people need to look at very carefully is the exponential growth curve that we're on. Because without that, you can't really see clearly as to what the future is likely to hold. And this is something that all of your listeners are familiar with in terms of electronics. You know, they fully expect two years from now when they go in to get a new telephone that'll have fantastic new features, faster, lower, you know, lower power, longer battery life, you know, lighter, whatever, you know, bigger screen, higher resolution, 4K, you know, who knows? But they certainly expect that it's going to change a lot in two years. On the other hand, you know, if you look at

the concrete industry, you don't expect much change in two years. In the car industry, yeah, you know, it's getting more interesting now with electric cars and automation. So that's, you know, where some electronics is coming in. But certainly in the electronics industry and computing and laptops and smart devices, you not only expect, you kind of demand that it's going to get much, much better very quickly. And the same is happening in the photonics world. Things are on an exponential growth curve happening so rapidly. the photonics world that things are on an exponential growth curve happening so rapidly you know led prices have dropped orders of magnitude in the last you know 10 15 years so that now you can put led light bulbs in your house lasers are going to be going into headlight

systems and soon into lighting systems lasers for industrial use, for projectors. These things are just changing absolutely dramatically, driven by consumer demand, driven by telecom industry. It's not being driven by us and Interstellar, and it's not even being driven, to be honest, by the DoD, even though the DoD is a recipient of much of that technological change. And they are doing wonderful things in directed energy. So I fully expect within 10 years that we will have worked through a lot of the technological issues. Prices will have dropped dramatically in many of the critical areas. But more importantly, with the funds both from NASA and with the breakthrough funds, which are, you know, very significant, we expect to have a 10-year, you know, I can imagine a 10-year program where a lot of the research and development and looking at the critical technological issues will be very much improved in terms of our knowledge

in 10 years. We will have built prototype systems. We will have built arrays to test them over large distances with small numbers of subarrays spread out. So we have a kind of a development path already in our minds of what we want to do over the next 10 years. And now we have some funds behind that to do this. But I think the real key, I believe the real key will not be just more of the same. It will not be precisely just scaling up. It will be in the extreme level of integration that will be possible as being made possible by the combination of photonics and electronics on the wafer scale. This is not the wafer scale spacecraft. This is wafer scale integration of photonics, lasers,

phase shifters, wave guides, all kinds of nitty-gritty details which can now be reduced and are being reduced down to the wafer scale. That will be the dramatic change that will happen over the next 10 to 20 years, and it was that, I firmly believe, which will enable this program to not only succeed,

but to be affordable and will have absolutely revolutionary consequences in the deployment of these kinds of technologies, rather ubiquitously in many other segments of society, you know, having nothing to do with planetary defense or interstellar travel, but having sort of everything to do with using lasers to better humanity's, you know, a place on Earth, you know, making clothes, making devices, you know, and medicine, helping with, you know, some sorts of laser surgery. We already use it for eye surgery. It's going to be amazing 10 years, 10, 20 years. You know, a gigabyte of memory costs a trillion dollars in 1960. A gigabyte of memory today costs a dollar.

Unbelievable numbers. 12 wars of magnitude decrease in price. That's the path we're on. And that's the path to the future. If I have just a moment to talk about something like Travis, this kind of individual, the Travis's of the world, will be the ones that carry this forward. They will be the ones and only dream but do. I'm with you on this one, unfortunately. 30 years from now, unless we have some major advance in medicine, you know,

I'm probably out of here in a different way than on a spacecraft. And I would only ask that they put some of my DNA on board, you know, just as a joke or some of my humor. You know, it's the younger generation that are going to make this happen. It's the Travis's of the world and it's a delight to work with these very passionate young people who, you know, really get it and they really see it and they really understand the transformation that will be possible. But I'm not going to be around most likely when this goes on. Travis, I should say, has had to leave us because, after all, he is a student and didn't want to be late.

There is one other topic I wanted to ask you about, Philip, and that is a Kickstarter campaign that Travis and you currently have underway. You're calling it the Humanity Chip. Tell us about it. So at that April meeting where we met in Italy, the Planetary Defense Conference, Travis and I had begun a series of discussions before that, but actually a lot of the humanity chip was born at that same meeting when we were talking in the lobby of the hotel about what would we like to put on the wafers that we were going to send out into interstellar space?

What would we like to put on board in addition to the cameras and the navigation devices and the photon thrusters and all the kind of geeky things that we have to put on board to make it work, laser communication, et cetera? How could we carry humanity with us? And it's basically at that moment that we really started serious discussions about what was going to go on board. And so we did some math and decided we could put messages from every single person on the planet on board. So much like the Voyager program carried with it, you know, the golden record, which has a tiny sampling of humanity on it, on a record, you know,

it's about the size of a big old, old style record. We can now place a message, a picture, eventually a movie, digital DNA, you know, poems. Ann Druyan told me just recently, instead of having to, you know, choose a handful of songs as they did for the Golden Record, how about every song ever recorded? Exactly. So we can send out the Library of Congress.

We can send out the entire iTunes, whatever. I don't even, this is, I'm not a social media person, but we can send out, you're right, every album ever recorded. And that's part of the goal of the humanity ship is to take humanity with us on every space mission not just the interstellar ones but we want to start now so we asked the university if we could do this inside the universe we wanted to crowdfund a human-based effort to put humanity on board and

make possible the ability for every person on the planet to literally be a part or be on board every space mission, and particularly the future interstellar missions, as emissaries of humanity. And we now have that capability technologically to do so at rather low cost and at such a low mass as to not perturb any spacecraft mission that we currently have and not even perturb the interstellar spacecraft missions that we're talking about. We could stick one of these on every, you know, NASA launch, every SpaceX launch, every Russian launch, every ESA launch, carry humanity everywhere, get every child in the world that wants to participate to, you know, to write a note, picture, make a sketch. You know, I mean, it's truly phenomenal when you look at it from a technological point of view. But our point of view was really

an extremely altruistic point of view. We're not out to make money. We're out to bring humanity with us. And so the university said, no, we can't do it inside the university because we don't have the ability to accept crowdsourced funds. It was just a technical issue.

So they said, just do it outside the university. So we said, okay. All right. So we started a Kickstarter about a week and a half ago with the goal of placing the voices of all of humanity on board. Imagine sending your picture of your favorite dog or your pet or, you know, a picture of your parents, your grandparents or your children. You parents, your grandparents, or your children. Just something that we want to engage people to get on board, literally. So if you want to learn more about our desire to bring humanity with us on all space missions, in particular bringing the voices of children, go to kickstarter.com or just look up Kickstarter space Vo know space voices of humanity just as it sounds or go to directed.energy no.com but it's easier just go to kickstarter or google us just

google voices of humanity kickstarter and it'll get you right to the page we do need some money to you know make this happen to gather the data parse the data, to put it on the small silicon wafers and prepare them for launch. We've already talked with launch providers to arrange some launches. And this is a very dynamic program. So the humanity chip that we produce today will be different than the one that we produce next year. We want this to be a continuing program that will evolve with time, not only as people get older and change their writings or pictures, et cetera, but technology is on an exponential growth curve. So what we can do today will pale by comparison than what we'll do 10 years from now. We will literally be able in 10 years

to take an HD movie from every person on the planet and put it on board. What we can do today is take a message from every single person on the planet and take small pictures from every person on the planet and put it on board and take digital DNA from a number of people on the planet who want to do so. But this is a very dynamic program, one that we hope all of humanity will join with us. A special part of the program is to enable children that can't provide even a dollar pledge, which is the sort of minimum category. We're going to work with schools in countries where it's not possible for children to do this, to make it possible. So people can pledge to, you know, help other children. We'll take some of the funds that we get in addition and direct them towards getting information from

children, letters from children that couldn't otherwise afford it. But we'd love people to get their messages and their pictures and their movies and audio. Some people have told us that they want to send the worst science fiction movies onto our black hole chip, which we have another chip called black hole chip. By the way, everyone, Travis has rejoined us. He's now in his car headed to wherever he needs to be. Travis, go ahead.

But, yeah, it's really interesting because it allows everyone access to space exploration, whether it's just for our first mission to low Earth orbit, then to eventual missions, say, to the moon or to Mars, I think it really opens up a wide array of not only missions to further pursue, but ways to involve humanity in this path, not in the physical form, but in the digital form. I think it's really awesome. Let me ask you the question I started to when we lost you before. Philip talked about where he hopes things will be in 10 years. I just wanted to see if you wanted to add anything to that, and even farther down the line, since you will be around.

We can actually use directed energy systems for a much wider variety of applications than we've talked about, and some of those applications are what I see as the future, and Phil and I are working on that now and going to publish a paper soon, and I think that's really where the future will lie. And like when we talk about relating to computers and the computer industry and the Moors paradigm that we kind of see happening in lasers, I think it's the coming, the next coming industry, just like the computer age. So I really think that's where the future will be and will hold for all of us. You're right in step with Philip on this.

Travis, since you are much more social media savvy, can you tell Matt how people would contact us on the Voices of Humanity? So basically it works is the person's Twitter handle name will be free as long as they tweet at Humanity Chip, which is our Twitter handle. And then if they just want that Twitter message to be included on the Humanity Chip, they just go to our Kickstarter and pledge $1. And then you can add extra things from there. Say you want to have up to 10 tweets or you just want to upload a private document to us later on, that would cost around $5. It goes up from there in terms of what

kind of data you want to put on board. But yeah, you really just tweet at Humanity Chip. We do it all for you from there. Gentlemen, you have been so incredibly generous with your time. I am very grateful for this and also for the truly amazing, awe-inspiring work that you have underway. truly amazing, awe-inspiring work that you have underway. And I look forward to following your progress as we head for the stars, quite literally. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot, Matt. Thanks, Matt. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its farsighted members.

Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed the theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.