Private group wants to launch "cheapest possible" mission to Alpha Centauri - Ars Technica

Overview

Private group wants to launch “cheapest possible” mission to Alpha Centauri

There are, by various estimates, several trillion planets within the local group of galaxies including our own Milky Way. Many of these are within the habitable zone of their stars. So if life finds a way, where are the alien civilizations?

Details

This is the crux of what is known as the Fermi paradox, which posits that if life is fairly common in the Universe, humans should have collected credible evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations by now. People who think about this paradox believe there may be some “filter” which limits or entirely prevents an advanced civilization from sending out probes or even life-bearing spacecraft to nearby stars.

Philip Johnston is someone who thinks a lot about the Fermi paradox. A mathematician and physicist from the United Kingdom, Johnston has gained some notoriety lately in the space community as one of the biggest proponents of orbital data centers. He co-founded Starcloud in 2024 to develop such data centers, and the company is presently valued at $2.3 billion.

Johnston is in the midst of scaling up Starcloud, working through technical issues, and raising hundreds of millions of dollars. So he’s pretty busy. But Johnston also wants to send a mission to the nearest star to our Sun and investigate the Fermi paradox.

On Tuesday, Johnston and a handful of other entrepreneurs announced the “Fermi Explorer” mission. In concept, it is simple. They seek to raise $15 million to build a small spacecraft, carrying a 1-kg payload, and launch it to Alpha Centauri such that it reaches that system in less than 80,000 years. Why? In conversations about the Fermi paradox, Johnston realized such a mission would knock two “filters” off the list: Species won’t want to send spacecraft beyond their home star, or species will find that interstellar transit is too difficult.

The goal was not to run to NASA and try to get it to fund a $1 billion mission or seek to develop a new propulsion technology like the Breakthrough Starshot mission proposed a decade ago. Rather, the Fermi Explorer team wanted to use existing technology to do something cheap, fast, and launch by 2029.

“So we were like, ‘Fuck it, let’s send a spacecraft for the cheapest amount possible, a bog-standard minimum viable mission to Alpha Centauri,’” he told Ars.

The main stumbling block involves getting the probe—essentially a large tank of Xenon gas and some solar panels for solar-electric propulsion, and a few small scientific payloads—moving fast enough. Solar-electric propulsion is super efficient, but once a spacecraft is beyond Jupiter, the solar energy flux is low enough that it might as well be zero for a spacecraft the size of the Fermi Explorer. Johnston and a small team spoke with many people, including trajectory experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to find a solution.

Nothing worked until Johnston linked up with Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist who founded Physical Superintelligence, an AI technology company. They fed the mission parameters into the AI, and it returned an 18-page technical feasibility assessment that offered a novel mission profile. It involves hanging around our Sun for more than a decade before charging out to Alpha Centauri.

Essentially, after launching into low-Earth orbit on a rideshare mission, the spacecraft would fly retrograde arcs to decrease its distance from the Sun at perihelion from 1 astronomical unit (Earth-Sun distance) to 0.42 astronomical units. At these close approaches to the Sun, taking advantage of the higher solar flux as well as the Oberth effect, the spacecraft would operate its propulsion system to increase its velocity with “perihelion pump” maneuvers.

It would achieve an escape trajectory after about 12 years, at a velocity of about 25 km/s, or about 55,000 miles per hour. At this speed, the Fermi Explorer could reach Alpha Centauri within about 77,000 years, flying on a ballistic coast.

The team would only have contact with the spacecraft for about 18 months, Johnston said. With retroreflectors on the vehicle, he expected ground-based telescopes to be able to track it until it reached Jupiter. After that, if all the maneuvering goes as planned, it will be gone—long gone. Only to turn up in the Alpha Centauri system a very long time from now.

If this all seems a little whimsical, well, maybe it is. But Johnston said the point is to get humanity thinking about our place in the Universe. If the Fermi Explorer mission can knock down a couple of the filters that might explain the Fermi paradox, that only leaves a few options for why our galaxy appears not to be littered with alien civilizations. One is that civilizations are exceptionally rare. If it is the case, then humans maybe should take our responsibility as stewards of the galaxy a little more seriously.

Another option is that superintelligence does not last long. Perhaps, then, governments on Earth ought not to be building swarms of killer drones? Maybe we should be careful about LLM agents running amok? “We could really be facing the great filter,” Johnston said. So let us go forward with eyes wide open.

1.          El Niño is now stronger than at any point in the last 1,000 years, study finds
   

2.          A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history
   

3.          Why it matters that President Trump just dialed in to a NASA news conference
   

4.          Google Maps renames "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" even faster than US government
   

5.          Raindrops are tiny lightning bolts, and they’re corroding cars, study finds
   

Ars Technica has been separating the signal from the noise for over 25 years. With our unique combination of technical savvy and wide-ranging interest in the technological arts and sciences, Ars is the trusted source in a sea of information. After all, you don’t need to know everything, only what’s important.

Key Takeaways

• Private group wants to launch “cheapest possible” mission to Alpha Centauri

• There are, by various estimates, several trillion planets within the local group of galaxies including our own Milky Way

• This is the crux of what is known as the Fermi paradox, which posits that if life is fairly common in the Universe, humans should have collected credible evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations by now

• Philip Johnston is someone who thinks a lot about the Fermi paradox

• Johnston is in the midst of scaling up Starcloud, working through technical issues, and raising hundreds of millions of dollars