Facebook Founder Joins New Space Initiative To Explore Outer-space, Thinking Differently, See What They Have Come Up With

by Benson Agoha | Technology

* Passionate about inter-connectivity, Mark Zuckerberg lectures on his 10-year
map to global connectivity also called the Internet of thins. (Credit: MZ)

Fresh from his live conference in which he listed the way forward for a 10 year program of research into better ways to communicate and reduce times differential, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg has announced his plan to join Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking in devising new and better ways to explore outer-space.

Explaining to his friends and followers on Facebook, Zuckerberg said their new space initiative to go beyond our nearby planets to explore others stars will be the first of its kind in human history.

"Our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years or about 25 trillion miles away. Even with today's fastest spacecraft, it would take 30,000 years to get there. That's too long" he says.

* The nanocraft can be accelerated by the speed of light up to 20%,
using an array of laser beams rom earth surface. (Credit: MZ)

Continuing, the Facebook CEO said: "The new idea here is that instead of using large spacecraft burning fuel like people have in all traditional space travel, we're ...going to create a fleet of tiny spacecraft -- or nanocraft -- that we can accelerate to 20% of the speed of light using an array of laser beams from our planet's surface. At that speed of 100 million miles per hour, it will only take 20 years to reach Alpha Centauri. This is a completely new way to think about space travel and exploration."

"The reason this project is important is recent research has found many stars have planets within a distance where they could have water to sustain life. That is, they're close enough to their star that any water isn't frozen but not so close that it has all evaporated. But just because a planet is in this habitable zone doesn't mean it has water and is a place we can actually live."

"For example, Mars has no water, so it would be difficult to ever live there. It's quite possible the closest planet that humans could actually live on is orbiting Alpha Centauri, and the only way to know that for sure is to visit close enough to photograph the planet, which is what this project will do."
Zuckberge said that over the years, he had worked Yuri on a number of science initiatives together, including creating the Breakthrough Prize and therefore, is excited to support this latest initiative between him and Stephen Hawking ... "and to help bring human space exploration to the stars."