– and proposed missions to Mars, which include NASA and China’s plans and commercial proposals by SpaceX. Of course, in addition to the challenges, many ethical, legal, and philosophical implications need to be addressed in advance. To this end, the eclectic panel of experts from various fields offered a good rundown and examinations of the particulars.
“No, we’re not ready. And it’s technology that’s the prohibitor. But we did conclude that being ready, at least for small robotic missions, is within reach. With the work that Breakthrough Starshot is doing and the spin-offs that might come from that, we all kind of envisioned that it might be possible to send a robotic probe within the next 100 years, give or take.
Project Starshot, an initiative sponsored by the Breakthrough Foundation, is intended to be humanity’s first interstellar voyage. Credit: breakthroughinitiatives.org “We’re an aspirational species. An aspiration of many human beings is to see our species explore very far away from our cradle, the Earth. But also, I think the other side of that coin is that you have to start somewhere. If you don’t have the aspiration, and you don’t start to make a plan and say, ‘Well, how do I go about that, what do I have to invent,’ you’ll never get it underway.
“In space, it is complicated, disabling; we’re going to get things wrong because you can’t know the answers, and horrible things are going to happen. But the idea [is] that we are preparing for as many situations as possible and in as many ways as possible. Because we have the time, we can really be thoughtful about how we’re creating the new future that we want. That’s why I think that it’s important to start the conversations early.