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Astrophysicist Proposes Paperclip-Sized Spacecraft Could Travel at Lightspeed to a Black Hole
"It sounds like science fiction: a spacecraft, no heavier than a paperclip, propelled by a laser beam," writes this report from ScienceDaily, "and hurtling through space at the speed of light toward a black hole, on a mission to probe the very fabric of space and time and test the laws of physics." ...
The data it gathers would take another two decades to get back to Earth, making the total mission duration around 80 to 100 years... Bambi notes that the lasers alone would cost around one trillion euros today, and the technology to create a nanocraft does not yet exist. "If the nanocraft can travel at a velocity close to the speed of light, the mission could last 40-50 years," Bambi writes in the article, while acknowledging his idea is certainly very speculative and extremely challenging..." "However, we should realize that most of the future experiments in particle physics and astrophysics will likely require long time (for preparation, construction, and data collection) and the work of a few generations of scientists, be very expensive, and in many cases, we will not have other options if we want to make progress in a certain field."
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