A long way to go
With more than $100 million in funding so far, Breakthrough Starshot is already off to a strong start, but it will inevitably cost billions to become a reality. However, according to Loeb, that puts it right in line with some of the world’s other most ambitious (and expensive) science projects, such as the Large Hadron Collider and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, which cost about $5 billion and $10 billion, respectively. Fortunately, as technology matures, the team expects the cost of each launch to fall to a few hundred thousand dollars. That’s still a lot of money, but obtaining up-close views of our nearest exoplanetary neighbors borders on invaluable.
In the likely best-case scenario, Breakthrough Starshot might begin launching StarChips to Proxima Centauri by the mid-2030s. Factoring in 20 years of travel time and four more years of waiting for the data to make it back to Earth, researchers wouldn’t get the first up-close and personal views of a star and planets beyond our solar system until at least 2060. And Milner said in a 2016 interview that it will likely take closer to a generation (perhaps 25 to 35 years) before the first trip is underway.
Supporting and funding a project that, optimistically, doesn’t launch until 2060 might seem like a frivolous venture to some — especially considering the slew of pressing events that have unfolded on Earth so far this decade. But as award-winning Cosmos writer and producer Ann Druyan, a member of the Breakthrough Starshot advisory board, said during a 2016 press conference announcing the initiative: “Science thinks in timescales of billions of years. And yet, we live in a society that only thinks in terms of, generally, the balance sheet of the next quarter or the next election. … So, this kind of thinking that looks at a horizon that’s 35 years away — possibly 20, possibly 50 — is exactly what’s called for now, because it’s this kind of multigenerational enterprise that nets us such great results.”
Loeb shares that same sentiment but puts it more succinctly by quoting Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
[Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Yuri Milner is Israeli-Russian, not Russian as a previous version stated.]