An Elephant Sculpture Made Of Snow And Ice Located In The Lobby Of The ICEHOTEL In Jukkasjarvi, Sweden. 

Paleo Chocolate Cupcakes

Stephen Hawking Is Building Thousands Of Tiny Spaceships To Find Intelligent Life

When asked what extraterrestrial intelligent life might look like, Hawking answered, "Judging from the election campaign, definitely not like us."

World famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced Tuesday their newest attempt to find extraterrestrial life: a project called Breakthrough Starshot.

“Today we commit to the next great leap in the cosmos,” Hawking told reporters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. “Because we are human and our nature is to fly.”

Hawking said the goal of Breakthrough Starshot was to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to us, within a generation by using thousands of tiny spaceships.

Astronomers believe an Earth-like planet could exist within the “habitable zones” of Alpha Centauri, located 25 trillion miles away. It is therefore the most likely place to find life or even, as Hawking said, a possible new home for future humans.

Breakthrough Starshot’s spacecrafts, which they call “nanocrafts,” will be a gram-scale computer chip that will include “cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, navigation and communication equipment,” Avi Loeb, a Harvard scientist involved in the operation told reporters.

A rocket would deliver a “mother ship” carrying a thousand or so of the nanocrafts into space. Once in orbit, the crafts would be propelled with thin sails and hyper-powerful laser beams shot from Earth into the universe to explore and discover. There the crafts would take pictures of their surroundings, which would take around four years to be sent back to earth.

The nanocrafts would travel at around 20% of the speed of light, Loeb said. At that rate it would be possible to reach Alpha Centauri in around 20 years, and the potentially habitable planets within 70. Using the best currently existing technology, it would take some 78,000 years.

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There is so much humanity has learned from the stars​. A few weeks ago I stumbled on a beautiful Navajo creation story that alludes to this.

“When all the stars were ready to be placed in the sky the First Woman said: I will write the laws that are to govern mankind for all time. These laws cannot be written on the water as that is always changing its form, nor can they be written in the sand as the wind would soon erase them, but if they are written in the stars they can be read and remembered forever.” - ​Navajo creation story quoted in ‘Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith and the Search for Order’ by George Johnson Image: Photographer Jack Fusco recently captured this incredible view of the night sky above the Anza-Borrego Desert in California.

Kinetic sculptures by British artist and physicist Paul Friedlander.

Full Venus and Crescent Moon Rise via NASA

The Earth at night. Photographs taken by NASA.

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